Lean leadership: Taking your company from striving to thriving

In this 1-hour workshop we will discuss the power of lean leadership which is the new behaviors we need from our managers to compete in the global manufacturing world.  Using a case study of a Tier One auto supplier, Manufacturing Excellence, we will cover the “Four Not-so-silent Killers”, the “Seven Behavior Traits of Lean Leadership” and introduce you to the “Eleven Skills in the Lean Leaders Toolkit”. 

This case study will show you how this firm went from barely surviving to thriving in less than one year -- and are still improving.  In the first 12 months, they improved their net profit from 5.3% to 9%, on time delivery went from a reported 98.2% (it wasn’t true) to 99.6% (which was true).  Engagement and morale improved as well as employee attrition dropped and for the first time, they began promoting from within almost exclusively.

Quality Consultants specializes in applying the Toyota "Respect for People" concept, which in leanspeak is workforce engagement. We particularly welcome those firms struggling to make the transformation and those who have tried and were less than successful. https://www.qc-ep.com/

Lonnie Wilson holds a degree in chemical engineering from Washington State University. He worked for Chevron Oil, where he spent 20 years in manufacturing management, including managing the engineering, operations, planning, environmental, and maintenance functions in 3 different refineries. He was also an in-house problem-solving expert and traveled extensively in that capacity. Wilson started Quality Consultants in 1990. Its clients include firms in manufacturing, education, health care and other service sectors. Quality Consultants serves small firms as well as Fortune 500 firms in North, South, Central America and China.

Wilson is a certified Master Black Belt and Six Sigma instructor and an expert in lean manufacturing techniques and applications. He not only instructs management professionals in the applications of these lean techniques, but he is also an on-the-floor and in-the-boardroom implementation professional. His focus is to assist firms struggling with cultural transformations and managers who have worked hard yet were not able to transform their company into a lean enterprise.

His books include “How to Implement Lean Manufacturing” (McGraw Hill, 2009,2015), which has been used as a textbook in 14 colleges and universities, including Beijing University, which facilitated the translation into Mandarin Chinese. He also wrote, “Lean Refining – How to Improve Performance in the Oil Industry” (Industrial Press, 2017) and “Sustaining Workforce Engagement-How to Assure Your Employees are Healthy, Happy and Productive" (Productivity Press, 2019). His most recent book is “Enlarging Your Problem-solving Footprint” (Wilson, 2021). In addition to his consulting practice, Wilson has taught quality and certification classes for ASQ. He also taught statistics and small group problem-solving at the University of Texas at El Paso. And for the last several years, he has been a guest lecturer in their MBA and executive MBA programs. He is currently working with Washington State University to develop their engineering and technology management degree program at the master’s level.

Tuesday, July 9, 2024

• 1 p.m. Introduction and presenter presentation
• 1:50 p.m. Q&A
• 2 p.m. Event adjourns

Participants will learn:

• Case study of improving net profit, on time delivery, employee engagement and moral, reduce employee attrition, build internal promotions.
• Start practicing the most powerful of the eleven skills in the "tool kit"

Current and future leaders including:

• C-level executives
• Middle management
• Operational leaders
• Change leaders responsible for lean and operational excellence transformation
• first level supervisors
• Team leaders
• Employees who want to create kaizen in their group