Sessions
Leadership/Culture
Leading Change – Managing Teams to Build a Lean Organization
Josh Ramsbottom, Operations Optimization Business Advisor, Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC)
As a leader looking to implement Lean concepts in your company, you will face a number of hurdles when it comes to people and attitudes. This session will explore how companies and Lean leaders have successfully overcome employee resistance and continue to work towards embedding a Lean culture in their operations. Generational attitudes, how to recruit and develop a successful Lean team, and the importance of communication to alleviate employee fears and misconceptions will be covered in this session. Real world examples highlighting issues other Lean leaders face will be used so you can learn from the journey others have already started.
Culture Eats Strategy
Peter Lovelace, President, Booster Spirit Wear
Do you believe that the engagement level of your employees has a profound impact on the success of your business? If you’re frustrated that more team members aren’t committed to your company and willing to put forth extra effort to deliver superior performance, then this session will help you do something about it. Discover the universal priorities that drive employee engagement and build a strong culture. Using real examples from Booster Spirit Wear, an international school focused apparel sales and printing company, he and his team will reveal how to evaluate the level of your employees’ engagement and, importantly, how to build a culture based on integrity, enthusiasm, leadership, results and care. Addressing the human side of your workplace is absolutely key to achieving operational excellence.
Unleash Your Workforce with Robust Systems to Improve Quality and Innovate
Steven Haedrich, President, New York Label & Box Works
Steven Haedrich had a wakeup call to quality when he took charge of this 140-year-old converter—its largest customer was threatening to take its business elsewhere. In his search for answers, he read Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming’s powerful book on how to manage for quality and avoid short-term thinking. Soon, Deming’s 14 points that underpin his philosophy became the company’s key tenants. Understanding how to apply these at a deep level took time and a boatload of commitment. This is Steven’s story of going against the grain of traditional thinking and the results it produced.
Changing Your Leadership Approach to Create CI Momentum
Rick Egelin, CEO, Fireblast Global
Several years ago, with growing frustration about his business, Rick Egelin took the definition of insanity to heart, remade himself as a leader, and transformed the company through Lean concepts. A Lean leaders group was formed, morning meetings were instituted, and Rick spent time everyday studying successful companies. Morale and trust slowly improved and goals were met. Four years later, this manufacturer of fire training equipment and facilities is a testament to the power of everyday improvement. Come learn what it takes.
Practicing the Behaviors of a Servant Leader
Art Barter, CEO, Datron World Communications
A chance meeting with management expert Ken Blanchard in 2003 caused the CEO of this multi-million dollar communications company to forever think about leadership differently. Training its entire staff to become “servant leaders” became central to how Datron built a culture that engages the hearts and minds of its associates in improvement, but also meets the company’s mission to positively impact the lives of others today and in the future. As part of that commitment, the company sets aside 10% of its operating profits for employee donations to charity. Learn why the right leadership style is so critical to having a successful CI program, the key elements that differentiate servant leadership from traditional, hierarchical leadership, and how servant leaders practice and model their behaviors.
Advanced Processes/Tools
Sustaining a 5S Culture
Paola Bozzer, Director, Manufacturing Efficiency and Procurement, TC Transcontinental Printing
Did you hear the joke about the company that achieved 15S? It repeated the first 3S’s five times … Let’s face it, sustaining 5S is a real challenge. While most companies can initially excel at sorting, straightening and shining, not long after, momentum is lost. With the experience of leading a sector-wide implementation of 5S in 33 business units across Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, Paola Bozzer will share proven tools and concepts that have kept 5S as an integral part of TC Transcontinental Printing’s manufacturing efficiency strategy. No matter the size of your facility, the tips and tricks offered by Paola will bridge the gap from concept to culture and will help in ensuring that your 5S system is a solid one.
Process Improvement Measurement Tools
Darrell Ward, Vice President of Manufacturing, Pollard Banknote
Your approach to communicating production goals and performance levels will determine employee trust, buy-in, and motivation. Pollard Banknote has refined its approach over the last decade and come up with a system easily understood by production crews that focuses on the process, not the person. It emphasizes the difference between normal variation and special cause variation that compels corrective action. When and how corrective action is applied makes all the difference. This case study reveals the methodology and thinking at one of North America’s leading producers of instant lottery tickets.
Blame the Person or the Process? You Make the Call
John Compton, Principal, Compton & Associates
Lean thinking and practices are fast becoming established as the prime improvement strategy in the printing industry. The twin pillars of “continuous improvement” and “respect for people” form the basis of continuous improvement practices. But what do you do when human error causes a quality failure? How do you respond? Human error is a fact of life, but the way you respond can have a profound impact on the ability of your company to accelerate its improvement. This interactive presentation will provide a framework for improvement and root cause analysis that focuses on the influence of processes and systems as significant contributors to human error.
Leading a Successful Waste Walk
Brian Van de Water, SPL Consulting, LLC
You’ve embarked on a Lean Journey, done some training, introduced tools, and conducted a few kaizen events. Now momentum has stalled due to the resources required to conduct major events. What do you do? This session introduces you to the concept of the waste walk. When used properly, this approach help leaders “see waste” in a way that identifies CI opportunities, both large and small. The smaller wastes can be dealt with quick, low-resource-requiring mini Kaizens. Learn how waste walks will not only fill the funnel but allow your leadership team to be integral in leading the charge.
Kata in the Classroom
Ron Pereira, Partner, Gemba Academy
CI expert Ron Pereira will run a hands-on exercise that introduces the scientific-thinking pattern of the Improvement Kata (IK). After this session, you will be able to run and use the exercise yourself. Scientific thinking is a basis for creativity and successfully pursuing seemingly unattainable goals. The IK is a four-step scientific striving pattern that is practiced in many top Lean organizations. It makes scientific thinking a teachable skill anyone can learn. Participants will work in teams and go through each step of the Improvement Kata pattern: (1) face a challenge, (2) measure where you are, (3) establish the next goal, and (4) experiment toward that goal. [Note: space is limited to 80 people.]
Fundamental Processes/Tools
A3 Thinking
Shannon Carver, Principal, Lean Leaders Plus
A3 has become a popular problem-solving methodology because of its simplicity, effectiveness, and visual nature; however, the real power of the A3 report comes from exposing the problem solver’s thinking and process. This report is fueled by an environment of trust, teamwork, collaboration, coaching, and development. This session will help you understand what A3 is and how it helps develop your organization’s culture of continuous improvement.
Rethinking Your Makeready Efficiency
Malcolm Keif, Professor, Graphic Communication, California Polytechnic State University—San Luis Obispo
Beating the competition requires steady gains in production efficiency. This session defines how to cut makeready time through the single-minute exchange of die (SMED) system, a vital component of Lean production. You’ll learn the concepts behind SMED, such as the distinction between internal and external tasks, and a specific multi-step process. Importantly, learn the tactics to conduct an improvement blitz over just a few days, which dramatically reduces your makeready time on a press or any other production equipment.
Standard Work: The Foundation of Continuous Improvement
Laurie VandenLangenberg, Business Analyst Manager, J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc.
Standard work is a collection of the best practices known at any given point or “how we currently do things.” Standard work creates calm. It reduces chaos, it’s organized, it’s useful, it empowers associates to problem solve on their own, and it fosters a culture of collaboration. If this sounds too good to be true, you’re wrong! While the thought of developing standard work may seem daunting, without it you can’t measure the success of any given task. If you are unclear about how something is done, you can’t improve it. In this presentation, you’ll learn about the benefits of standard work, some simple methods to tackle the beast of developing standard work, and how you can easily maintain standard work through a culture of continuous improvement.
Capturing and Managing Improvement Opportunities
Nick Shonsky, Director of Continuous Improvement, and Scott Reighard, COO, The Standard Group
Are the continuous improvement projects visible to everybody in our organization? Does our system not only help us reach our goals, but also encourage participation and teamwork? These are some of the questions that The Standard Group, a print management and marketing logistics company, had when it began to invest more resources into its continuous improvement effort. One night while shooting pool in a back alley joint, Standard’s CI director was introduced by a regular to a tool that drastically changed Standards’ pace of improvement. Standard team members will explain how the company’s new electronic project management tool is configured, used, and helps discover improvement opportunities that went overlooked before.
The Seven Quality Basics
Andrew Quibell, Global Head of Quality Assurance, Vistaprint
What does a comprehensive and well-executed quality system look like? The Seven Quality Basics are a proven approach for delivering exceptional product quality, which has significantly reduced manufacturing defects and driven higher levels of customer satisfaction at Vistaprint. This initiative has also helped create a “culture of quality” across the workforce. The Seven Quality Basics help promote greater team member involvement in assuring quality, provides effective controls for the leading sources of waste, and delivers state-of-the-art approaches for proactively identifying problem areas in the manufacturing process. This session should be of interest to all organizations that are serious about improving product quality regardless of the maturity of their current quality practices.
Developing People
A Sustained CI Experience: Tools and Inspiration
Tayrn Davis, Continuous Improvement Manager, Hope Foods; Shannon Kearney, Lean Facilitator, Gill Studios; Kathy Osterburg, Quality Manager, GLS Precision Marketing
Sustainable. Personal. Inspiring. These are all hallmarks of a CI journey—seeking perfection even when we know it doesn’t exist. As individuals and professionals who appreciate the value of this journey, our biggest challenge is often the same as that which brings about our greatest success: the people involved. This session will give you valuable insight into how to encourage and inspire your management team, win over challenging people, support those who are already walking with you, and ultimately lay a foundation for continuous improvement throughout your organization.
Developing Better Coaching Habits
Cheryl Jekiel, CEO, Lean Leadership Center
One of the most important traits of a leader is the ability to be a good coach to your team. During this interactive session, we will review how to listen better and ask more effective questions to build your coaching skills. Participants will learn and practice the core components required of basic coaching skills and take away an action plan suitable to building better coaching habits on a daily basis.
Enraged to Engaged: Fixing Frustration with Team Performance
Ross Paterson, President, XM Performance
Team dysfunction is a common but often overlooked problem in the workforce. It’s the leader’s job to ensure the team runs effectively and efficiently. Often, team leader’s lack the knowledge to truly get their teams performing at their full potential. This presentation will explain the four missing pieces that lead to dysfunction and how to take your team from frustrated and disorganized to engaged and performing at their best.
Cultivating Your Emotional Awareness to Gain Frontline Buy-In
LeKisha McKinley, Chief Executive, LQM Business Stratigists
For a company to gain value from an improvement effort, the person leading the initiative must be relatable, empathetic, and able to meet frontline team members on a human level. Thus, the emotional intelligence of the coach is a critical aspect in determining whether frontline team members will take ownership and sustain an effort. Learn how to use your emotional awareness to address the social side of change and understand the needs, concerns, and emotions of the individuals who will ultimately determine how fast your company improves.