Steve Hodlin
vice president of business excellence
DST Output

Some of the world’s largest companies rely on DST Output to print bills and statements, then insert them into envelopes for mailing.  But when an important new improvement program stalled, DSTO energized it by inserting lean thinking into the effort.

Faced with poor quality and delivery performance and the threat of customer defections, DSTO launched a six sigma training effort five years ago to fix  processes and implement a strategic goal of making every customer a reference.  But the effort got off to a slow start as everyone at the director level and above received three-days of training as champions, then waited for a supporting cadre of black belts and green belts to be trained to attack problems.  Improvement projects dragged as green belts, who also performed their regular work duties, had limited times to devote to projects.  When Hodlin introduced lean thinking, an initial kaizen event at the  Kansas City plant (one of three processing centers in the U.S.) made immediate improvements that re-energized the workforce and the improvement effort.  Members of the California plant participated and immediately embarked on lean improvements in material flow that were further deployed to the Hartford and Kansas City plants.

Learn how the merged lean and six sigma effort spread company-wide under the banner of “lead with lean, follow with six sigma,” generating rapid progress and new energy for the improvement effort among the company’s  3,000 associates, technicians, engineers, and managers.  You’ll also learn how the effort spread from manufacturing to engineering, and, most recently, to software development.

You’ll hear how the company is institutionalizing a continuous improvement culture based on the plan-do-check-act cycle by developing the belief that everyone’s job from the top floor to the shop floor has a “dual function” consisting of a daily job and an improvement job.  And you’ll learn how DST Output, the largest third-party first-class mailer in the U.S., uses the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for biennial self assessment and for prioritizing strategic and improvement goals.

James Hereford
executive vice president,
Strategic Services and Quality
Group Health Cooperative

Imagine if you could:

• Have predictability to your day and your work?
• Send 50% less time in meetings?
• Receive 50% fewer emails?
• Fight 50% fewer fires?
• Have better success sustaining the gains of your lean efforts.

Learn how Group Health leadership is successfully pursuing these goals by developing and expanding a system of standard work for managers that creates a stable platform for continuous improvement throughout the company.

Variations in management, as in any process, make the root causes of problems difficult to identify.  The result: you spend inordinate amounts of time every day just determining if work is in or out of control.  Even worse: improvement gains become difficult to sustain, a common occurrence across the Lean Community.

To solve these problems, Group Health, a consumer-governed, nonprofit healthcare system based in Seattle, tested “a model line” for managing differently.  By applying the plan-do-check-act cycle, one division would try to develop a linked system of standard work interconnected through the various levels of management.  Now, the two year-old successful experiment is being deployed companywide, and now you can hear the how-to details.

You’ll learn: how and why Group Health launched the experiment; how it applied many cycles of PDCA; how a unified visual management system quickly signals if there is a problem; how a framework for daily management and measuring is deployed during rapid improvement events to sustain and improve new processes; how standard work connects front-line managers, directors, and senior managers; and how standard work enhances how managers at all levels work -- including giving them more time to spend on improvement activities.

The breakout session will give you details about the management standard work framework and how to develop and deploy your own.  You’ll learn: how kaizen boards create daily connections among management levels; how a functional area, such as a department or business unit, begins implementing standard work; how linked deployment occurs across management levels; how to develop standard measures and checks for managers; how to apply the PDCA process to improve standard work.

Jeff Whiteacre
value stream manager
Gorton’s Seafood

For 10 years Gorton’s Seafood has been using a lean transformation to make waves in the highly competitive frozen convenience food business.  Lean principals, applied tirelessly for a decade in the plant, supply chain, and with equipment makers helped the company remain competitive on price while bringing innovative products to market faster than competitors. 

Find out how Gorton’s, founded in 1849, makes extensive use of value-stream mapping and kaizen events as part of a growth strategy that involves people in a continuing cycle of identifying waste then relentlessly removing it to create the next future state, and the next, and the next, etc. Whiteacre, who has led the lean effort from the start, will share maps from Gorton’s continuous improvement journey.  He’ll explain how the company consolidated operations from three floors of its processing plant to one, then steadily spread the lean transformation beyond its four walls through the extended value chain.  You’ll also hear about Gorton’s decision to forego using outside consultants or building a big internal improvement department, in favor of developing a “home grown” lean conversion based on embedding lean champions at the shop and office-floor levels.

The breakout session will dig into the details of how the company has worked with suppliers since an early value-stream mapping training, how it has kept suppliers involved for a decade, and how it is spreading lean concepts to suppliers’ key suppliers.  You’ll learn what Gorton’s does to engage suppliers and how it measures and rewards them.  The session also will examine how the company uses value-stream mapping to progress from current state to future state to ideal state, with an accent on the role of right-sized equipment and cell layout.  You’ll learn how Gorton’s works with equipment suppliers to build equipment capable of performing faster changeovers and throughput, and meeting takt times. You’ll get practical examples of what steps the company took to immediately and dramatically improve flow by cutting batch sizes and inventories.

Craig Estep
vice president of Citation/Caravan Operations
Cessna Aircraft Company

Since beginning its lean journey in 1999, Cessna has had to make changes to the trip’s flight plan.  After beginning the transformation with spot kaizen events in assembly to remove capacity constraints, the company realized the need to create stability in key component processes.  When the corporate emphasis shifted to six sigma for a few years, the company ultimately learned how six sigma complemented the lean effort.  

Now firmly set on a lean conversion course, Cessna is building on the lessons learned. You’ll learn about lean as a growth strategy as the company grew from $1.4 billion in revenue in 2004 to $5 billion today. You’ll learn how Cessna is extending the transformation to support areas and how lean leadership is becoming more of a focus as the company evolves from a command-and-control culture to one stressing learning.  (Estep will share insights from his three-year journey from a manager who gave answers to one who now asks the right questions in order that employees can develop as problem solvers.)  He’ll also explain  how Cessna is stepping up the pace of change with “lean accelerators,” teams that implement culture change in area along with lean tools. He’ll discuss the implementation of leveling and kanban  and the shift away from MRP for daily production control. And he’ll share results, such as the elimination of nearly $600 million in inventory.

The breakout session will concentrate on the tactics Cessna is using to bring front-line supervisors, middle managers, and engineers on board with the lean cultural change and how it is extending the lean conversion to design, finance, human resources, marketing, and other support areas. You’ll also learn about Cessna’s project to develop lean leaders from within the company. The session will cover key elements of the Textron Production System, how teams are organized, and the roles of skills coaches and subject matter experts.

Changer in a Strange Land
Stephanie Kerr, vice president of business transformation, CCC Information Services
Guy Parsons, faculty member, Lean Enterprise Institute; president, Lean Transformations Group

What happens when a seasoned organization development professional brings traditional change management approaches to a lean transformation? What are the strengths and weaknesses of formal change management models in the context of a lean transformation? The real-world answers in this practical session will give you more than a small batch of useful take-aways on how to lead effective change at the individual and organizational levels. You’ll explore the typical stages of change, how to motivate and move individuals and groups through the stages, and how to deal with individual reactions to change. You’ll also hear some practical Dos, Don’ts and Maybes about driving change in a lean transformation.

Using Human Resources to Develop Lean Managers
Dave LaHote, president, Lean Education Value Stream, Lean Enterprise Institute

What makes a lean manager? Is it knowing 5S, value-stream mapping, and kanban?  Or is it knowing how to ask the right question instead of issuing the right answer; how to use plan-do-check-act thinking, instead of jumping to a solution; and how to get people to take initiative to improve their jobs?  Obviously, the latter skills are the ones you want because knowledge of tools, while necessary, is not sufficient to develop lean managers.  Yet most organizations fall into the trap of keeping their lean effort and Human Resources Department completely separate.  The result is that lean management development becomes focused on tools rather than focused on developing leaders who think and act differently.  In this innovative session, you’ll get a practical understanding of how to incorporate the advancement of lean behaviors into the regular HR process of developing managers.  You’ll understand: the real key to creating successful managers, how to make lean management “the way we do things” instead of just a program, and how to cultivate lean management behaviors as an integral part of your existing management development process.  Human Resource managers and executives, and senior executives focused on developing management talent will benefit most from this session.

Follow the Learner: The Path to Creating a Lean Learning Lab
Dr. Sami Bahri, D.D.S., Founder, Bahri Dental Group, Jacksonville, Florida

What turns a small dental practice in Jacksonville, Florida into a living, breathing Lean learning laboratory? Simple.  A dentist who has spent almost 20 years trying to answer the question, "How can we fully restore a patient's oral health as quickly as possible without wasting their time or money?" Dr. Sami Bahri, the world's first "lean dentist" will share how Bahri Dental has been transformed from a traditional "batch and queue" dental operation to a "one-patient flow” model.  You’ll learn: the needed changes in training and responsibilities for every staff member, the leadership practices that Dr. Bahri used during the transformation process, and the practical steps taken to engage every person in the lean learning process - creating lean thinkers and doers.  We guarantee that visits to your own doctor or dentist will never look or feel the same way again!

Using Value-Stream Mapping for Cultural Transformation
James Luckman, faculty member, Lean Enterprise Institute; member, Lean Transformations Group, LLC
Kirk Paluska, faculty member, Lean Enterprise Institute; partner, Lean Transformations Group, LLC

Organizational assumptions, policies, and conventions reside above the value streams you are trying to improve, driving waste into them every day and blocking the meaningful cultural transformation that will make a significant difference in performance.  In this pioneering session, based on years of mapping experience with a variety of companies, you’ll learn to recognize how organizational assumptions stand in the way of using value-stream mapping for true cultural transformation.  More importantly, you’ll understand how to use mapping, not only for simply reengineering processes, but for a  transformation that engages senior managers in changing how they think about the business.  Through discussion, an exercise, and real-world examples, you’ll learn: the three different levels of value-stream mapping projects (process, engagement, and transformational), how to identify unconscious assumptions inherent in the organizational culture, how to focus leaders on attacking underlying assumptions that will transform the company, and why failure to surface and attack assumptions injects noise into processes that frustrates finding root-cause solutions.

Lean-er Thinking for Harder Times
David Meier, founder and president of Lean Associates, Inc., co-author with Jeffrey Liker of The Toyota Way Fieldbook and Toyota Talent  

The economy is slowing, but now is not the time to slow your continuous improvement and people development efforts.  Now is the time to use lean-er thinking to identify the hidden opportunities for future growth and to motivate people to push ahead with continuous improvement.  In this session you’ll learn how lean leaders:

• use problem-solving thinking to completely grasp the situation, analyze it to find hidden opportunities for growth, and create a vision for the future that includes positioning for growth, diversifying revenue streams, and increasing market share as weak competitors perish.
• create processes that are flexible and adaptable to future market cycles.
• quickly reduce variable costs in materials, energy, facilities maintenance, etc.
• cultivate ideas for utilizing resources more effectively by developing talented people.
• challenge people in new ways to find hidden opportunities for greater improvement.
• develop people and improve process to capture future opportunities.

• counter the normal tendency of people to shift into self-preservation mode during tough times. 
• guide and develop people through the current challenges.