They say, “It’s not the destination. It’s the journey.” For the continuous improvement community, we live this everyday as we move our organizations toward an ideal state of enterprise excellence.
This is the lean journey, and AME considers itself a navigator or wayfinder on your pathway to excellence. In fact, we’ve begun using that very term, “Pathway to Excellence,” as the name of a webinar series that brings together leaders from industry to discuss the way forward during and after the pandemic. To date, Harry Moser of Reshoring Initiative and Robert Martichenko of LeanCor have hosted powerful webinars on reshoring and supply chain risk avoidance, respectively, as part of the series.
As the Pathway to Excellence webinar series rolls on, we’re excited to welcome David R. Brousell of the National Association of Manufacturers next Thursday to present on the COVID-19 pandemic’s influence on manufacturing 4.0. And we’ll welcome Jayson Meyers of Next Generation Manufacturing Canada to talk about advanced manufacturing on July 23, and AME board member, Peggy Gulick, on July 30 to discuss how her company, AGCO, is embracing the impact of COVID-19.
But the AME Pathway to Excellence is much more than just a series of connected webinars. It’s a framework that guides organizations through trainings, best-practice content, lean certification, and assessments.
To navigate, we use the AME Lean Sensei™ as both an assessment tool and a guide. It forms the basis for how organizations identify areas for improvement by benchmarking off past AME Excellence Award recipients. The elements included in the AME Lean Sensei™ have been identified by expert continuous improvement practitioners and level-set off the world’s leading lean organizations. It also provides the basis for our programming both at the now-virtual AME International Conference and throughout the year.
As we navigate the pandemic, there are indicators that many organizations are maintaining or initiating continuous improvement programs. We’ve seen a dramatic increase in new users on our website – up about 25% for the past 30 days compared to that same period last year — as people sign up for new virtual trainings and our annual conference, research best practices in our Target archives, and download the AME Lean Sensei™ app.
Our partnership and our promise to you is that AME will continue to help you share, learn and grow by providing the tools, information, assessments and guidance you need. The AME Pathway to Excellence is here to help navigate the challenges you face — new and old — no matter where you are in your lean journey. Because, after all, it is the journey, not the destination, that matters most.
As always, please stay safe and keep looking out for one another.
P.S. Join us at the 100% virtual AME International Conference to energize your journey this October. Register by July 31 to receive $150 off the already deeply discounted price.
