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Featured Presentations

• Dr. Charles Fine, Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and acclaimed author of Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in an Age of Temporary Advantage, will discuss the growing interdependence between suppliers, product developers, and product architecture choices. He will talk about supply chain strategies for an environment of constant flux, short technology half-lives, and critical market timing.

• Stuart Smith, VP of Supply Chain Management at Dell Computer, will share his perspective on the strategy of virtual integration. Perhaps the most admired supply chain model in the world, Dell continues to plow new territory.

• Dr. Christopher Couch of Toyota Motor Corporation is heading up a new group to transfer knowledge from Japan to North America. He will discuss how to expand product development capabilities globally, including management of operations and technology.

• Dr. Marshall Fisher, Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, will focus on matching supply chain strategy to product type, the subject of an excellent article he wrote in the Harvard Business Review (March-April 1997). He explores "innovative" versus "functional" products and when to optimize market responsiveness as opposed to performance and cost-efficiencies.

• Dr. John Konopka of IBM will describe how his group implemented Fisher’s concepts and Accurate Response framework, and what results were achieved.

• Dave Nelson, VP of Worldwide Supply Management at Deere & Company and formerly a corporate officer of Honda of America, will discuss building trust and profitability, i.e. supplier development, in a lean context. Nelson is one of the most deeply respected supply management executives in the country. He will also participate in a Q&A panel and Focused Breakout Session with his Powered By Honda co-author, Patricia Moody (who also wrote Breakthrough Partnering, Kaizen Blitz and The Technology Machine).

• Bill Madsen of Corning is invited to describe how this exceptionally agile technology company has continually reinvented itself by leveraging core competencies. Many joint ventures and supplier relations are strained when intellectual property and patents are at stake. Learn how Corning, the largest supplier of fiber optic in the world, has addressed this dilemma.

• Joe Yurkin and Bill Livingston of Dell Computer will share the implementation details of Dell Peripheral Development Group’s "Dell-Supplier Cooperative Development Program." The documented process, the implementation, and the measurement of progress for projects and partners will be discussed.

• Jason Amaral of Hewlett Packard and Dr. Scott Elliott of Product Development Consulting will talk about Design for Variety, a powerful design concept that enables mass customization at a low cost and quick response. DFV’s up-front design of products and processes counteract the complexity and uncertainty factors that paralyze most supply chains.

• Two full concurrent sessions on design, processes and technology. One session will be led by Kevin Keegan of Pittiglio, Rabin, Todd & McGrath (PRTM) who will bring together a group of industry practitioners including Sprint PCS and Solectron who have achieved speed and flexibility within high cost-pressure and lifecycle-pressure environments

• The other will be led by Bart Huthwaite, Huthwaite Group and Institute for Competitive Design (and author of soon-to-be published Modular By Design: Developing Complex Products in Turbulent Times) and Dr. Hans Tanner, Schuh Complexity Management, who will show how to partner with suppliers in reducing product complexity. Joining them will be industry practitioners who have developed modular products and subsystems.

• Focused Breakout Groups will be held on Tuesday afternoon, September 14. In several simultaneous sessions, experts and practitioners will be on hand to offer details of their experience and answers to your specific questions. The subjects of these sessions include: Dell’s Cooperative Development Program (including qualification criteria), Enabling Technologies (Extranets, Intranets, software such as CSM, PDM and ERP), Design for Variety, Breakthrough Partnering for Lean Product Development, and more.

• For step-by-step implementation guidelines, Bart Huthwaite and Hans Tanner will also lead a half-day post-conference workshop on Wednesday, September 15, "Lean Product Development: Faster Products, Fewer Suppliers, Less Cost." This dynamic workshop will provide practical techniques to simplifying and modularizing products for the supply chain. With lean product architectures, benefits include less inventory, greater coverage of customer needs, reuse of parts and knowledge, easier assembly, faster product development, and better suppliers.

Click here to download the conference brochure with full program details (132kb - Acrobat .pdf).