Attend this event as part of MRT's:

Pre-Conference Workshops
Monday, March 4, 2002

Workshop A - 8:00am-12:00pm
Value Stream Mapping Your Supply Chain: Seeing Waste and Doing Something About It
Instructor: Ed Constantine, Chairman, Simpler, Inc.

Profitable growth is not an accident. It happens to companies that do a good job of developing the right products and also deliver these products with Lean high-performance value streams.As awareness of the Toyota Production System has increased in North America during the past 15 years, hundreds of companies have pursued Lean conversions inside their own walls. Value Stream Mapping has been a powerful tool in helping these companies see waste clearly and do something about it.

Most companies struggle with how to create high performance from the whole value stream - stretching far beyond their own walls. This broader value stream starts at the raw materials and ends with the end customer. It involves multiple businesses. Ultimately, it's the performance of this total value stream that is the end-customer’s chief concern.

The majority of the workshop will be spent in small-group activities and will discuss specific case study examples. Participants in this workshop will learn:

Lean principles and the structure of Value Stream Mapping

How to use Value Stream Mapping to identify waste in your supply chain

How to create action plans to eliminate supply chain waste

Ed Constantine is an MIT graduate. As an Operations Manager at Jake Brake in the 1980s, Ed learned Toyota Production System from the Shingijutsu Group (former members of Toyota's Autonomous Study Group - originators of TPS in Japan). Ed was key to Jake Brake's successful export of products to Japanese customers, helping Jake Brake become one of Mitsubishi's zero defects suppliers. As Plant Manager and Operations VP at HON, Ed led four plants to Lean success in the office furniture industry.

Workshop B - 12:00pm - 5:00pm
Attacking Waste and Variability in the Supply Chain: Lean Six Sigma Process
Instructor: J. Cooper Crouse, Vice President, George Group

A recently published survey showed that the top two management challenges for industrial and consumer products manufacturers were (1) increasing flexibility and speed and (2) reducing costs in their businesses.

This interactive workshop will demonstrate the power of integrating the improvement approaches and solutions of Lean and Six Sigma to create a fast, flexible and cost-effective supply chain. Participants will engage in the process for identifying and prioritizing sources of customer dissatisfaction, internal waste and process variability in the simulated supply chain. Improvement teams will then focus on the highest return areas and utilize Lean and/or Six Sigma tools to remove capacity, time and variability bottlenecks in the process. In the end, a new supply chain emerges that is faster, more efficient and more effective than before. This is a fast paced, hands-on simulation led by experienced Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belts.

Peterson75.jpg (4642 bytes) J. Cooper Crouse is a Vice President with George Group. He has led consulting engagements in many industries including pet food, pharmaceutical research, avionics, telecommunications equipment and information storage and retrieval. Crouse's joint client-consultant team efforts have attacked waste and variability in manufacturing and support processes and employed performance improvement tools of Kaizen, 5s, Pull Systems, Poka Yoke, Six Sigma, Simulation, cycle-time compression and supply chain design. Crouse is a 1986 graduate of the US Naval Academy and earned his MBA from Indiana University in 1993.