Day One Workshops: 16 September, 2008

MORNING SESSIONS 8.30 – 11.30

THINK TANK A: Improve customer satisfaction and financial results by using Lean Six Sigma in your financial departments to streamline transactional processes

WORKSHOP B: Aligning project selection and tactical improvements to your strategic business goals: The Hoshin Planning Process

WORKSHOP C: Combining Innovation with your Lean Six Sigma training to maximize your training results and ROI

Are you looking to streamline your financial functions and deliver hard hitting improvements in customer experience?

Looking to drastically improve your operating and processing efficiency to cut Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and bad debt reserves? This think tank could really help you on the way to solving these business critical challenges…

Lean Six Sigma tools and practices can be easily applied by end-to-end cross-functional teams to streamline transaction processing cycle time and improve worker productivity, which results in rapid and significant customer experience and boosted financial results.

In this interactive discussion session, Troy will first present you with Grainger’s experience and then help you build practical strategies to streamline your own financial services:

Aligning cross-functional leaders and agendas across the order-to-cash process to achieve increased customer satisfaction
Creating a portfolio of new process and technology innovations by using Lean Six Sigma tools like Value Stream Maps
Track and monitor order-to-cash, process vital signs by developing and deploying an end-to-end process measurement system
Teach your operational leaders about Lean Six Sigma and engage employees to build a culture of continuous improvement by using strategic improvement initiatives

Troy Vellinga
Vice President, Continuous Improvement
W.W. Grainger Inc.

Take your lead from world class organizations such as Toyota, Danaher, and Hewlett Packard, who are utilizing the Hoshin Planning Process to develop visionary, forward thinking, achievable strategic plans that strive to continuously improve their organization’s key business processes. So what will Hoshin do for your deployment?

Hoshin Planning will help you create a systematic methodology for developing long-range objectives without losing sight of the key fundamental day-to-day business measures necessary for success in your operations. Through ensuring that everyone in your organization is working toward the same goal it will help you create a hierarchical flowdown of core objectives through the organization to your key business process owners.

You will learn how to align all the tactical improvement activities of your organization with the strategic vision and breakthrough objectives, utilizing the seven step Hoshin Planning process.

Take away a step-by-step deployment framework of the Hoshin Planning Process including:

Creating the mission and vision statements for strategic alignment
Executing an environmental scan
Defining your long-range breakthrough objectives and aligning the organization via a flow down catchball process
Identifying and rationalizing your improvement initiatives to ensure that all projects are in line with your strategic objectives
Putting a review cycle in place to evaluate and sustain improvements
Using risk mitigation and course corrections to remove process bottle necks and higher ROI on resources
Creating an annual renewal process to ensure continual improvement

Mike Wall
President
Better Enterprise Solutions Corp

Training is one of the most significant investments made in driving Lean Six Sigma practices deep into the fabric of an organization, but there is no ‘one size fits all model’ and there are still many outstanding questions on what the best methods are:

Are instructor-led classes the only way?
What is the role of e-Learning, and other technologies to accelerate learning?
How can you carry out refresher and recertification training, and increase the vitality of your program?
How can you train a global workforce, consistently and in multiple languages?
How can executives be quickly trained in order to become effective Champions?

If you want the answers to these questions, and are an experienced Lean Six Sigma leader, don’t miss this workshop. The purpose is to draw out experiential knowledge and best practices from seminar participants. Rob will also share insights gained from some of The Quality Group’s ‘best practices’ work with such organizations as Black & Decker Corporation, CSX Transportation, Owens-Corning and Seagate.

You will:

Define your goals for Lean Six Sigma training, and be better equipped to build a deployment plan to get there
Establish a leaner, better, more measurable process for training
Recognize what’s working well, and what needs improvement in your own training process
Calculate the potential ROI from investments in training technologies

Rob Stewart
President & CEO
The Quality Group

LUNCHTIME SESSIONS 11.30 – 2.30

THINK TANK D: Getting it right first time by rolling out Lean Six Sigma to customer-facing departments

THINK TANK E: Making Sustainability Actionable: Sustainable Lean Sigma at DTE Energy

Research proves it is 9 times easier to keep a customer than to gain an new one. As such, customer service and satisfaction is core to your business growth and success. This discussion session will brainstorm how Lean Six Sigma can be applied in your customer-facing departments to really drive service excellence.

Define the processes and metrics used in call centers for a tailored and results-driven Lean Six Sigma program
Use VOC data to drive increased customer satisfaction and loyalty
Improve and measure first contact resolution to minimize customer complaints at point of contact
Define and re-engineer departmental processes successfully and manage their cause and effect relationship by incorporating Lean Six Sigma strategies into the analysis of customer feedback

John Demonica
SVP Operations
Compucredit

Dari Damazo
Director Training and Development, Operations
Compucredit

This session will explore how your continuous improvement program can be extended to address environmental and social sustainability concerns alongside its traditional, operational and financial focus. With green and social responsibility rising in the business agenda, are you prepared to react and innovate your business model? Moving on from just improving business results and operational performance, DTE Energy is extending Lean Six Sigma methods to address environmental and social sustainability concerns. Consequently they are turning Triple Bottom Line™ concepts into concrete, actionable priorities that can be measured and replicated consistently across the organization. With this in mind, Jason and Mike will discuss how the methods and techniques used to analyze environmental and social challenges can enhance your existing Lean Six Sigma initiative.

Applying Lean and Six Sigma methods to address environmental and social sustainability concerns
Expanding your existing continuous improvement tools with concepts, methods, and analytic approaches from environmental and social sustainability practitioners
Enhancing profitability and competitive advantage through the Triple Bottom Line ™
Engaging your employees, stakeholders, and customers more fully by embracing the sustainability challenge
Standardizing your approach to environmental and social challenges with rigorous, reliable, and reproducible methods

Jason Schulist
Director Continuous Improvement
DTE Energy

Michael Sklar
Continuous Improvement Manager
DTE Energy

WORKSHOP F: Moving from program to scorecard-driven improvement for a more strategic approach to Lean Six Sigma

WORKSHOP G: Engaging in Lean Six Sigma: The good, the bad, and the ugly on execution

Many Lean Six Sigma programs have a natural but limited lifespan. As such, last year programs showing up to $75m+ of savings were disbanded due to organizational reshuffles. Make sure you are not one of them!

This workshop will help you change your initiative or program into something that survives and thrives.

Improvement professionals may think in terms of cause-effect, but the trick is to educate line managers and business leaders to think the same way. This workshop will concentrate on the techniques used by best practice companies to change the way their ‘management review cycle’ operates by showing you how to achieve:

Robust linkage between measurements, decisions to act, and the result of actions that’s clear to all employees
Results of performance improvement that are owned, and sought after, by line managers
Performance improvement that’s embedded as the way the company does business

Paul Docherty is the CEO of i-nexus

This interactive workshop will showcase the ‘good, the bad and the ugly’ of implementation and help companies interested in adopting a Lean Six Sigma program learn from the experience of others. Taking from their experience of training and deployment in cross industry sectors, Global Corporate College will examine and evaluate common mistakes and common steps to success in the deployment of Lean Six Sigma. Participants will engage in a business strategy session, step one in assuring that they avoid the common mis-steps others have made.

Hear lessons learnt form Amtrust, take away top tips on:

How to avoid the pitfalls of other deployments
Proven and step-by-step tools for initial program deployment
A framework for creating a successful and sustainable deployment
How to turn a bad or ugly deployment in to a great deployment

Denise Reading
President
Global Corporate College

Tom Fazekas
MBB, Trainer/Consultant
Global Corporate College

AFTERNOON SESSIONS 2.30 – 5.30

THINK TANK I: Streamlining your cross organizational IT processes for maximized efficiency and delivery

WORKSHOP J: Enterprise-wide Lean Sigma Deployment Sequence Simulation

In this session Ron will present and discuss the implementation of Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) using Lean Six Sigma in and Information Technology (IT) organization and how to secure the buy-in for true cultural change. He will share his experiences from The Department of Defense, Chief Information Office/Network Information Integration (CIO/NII) office in adopting the use of CPI/LSS to affect transformational process improvements. What are some of the challenges encountered and what are the lessons-learned? Can IT transactional processes benefit from the use of Continuous Process Improvement using Lean Six Sigma? Discussion will include:

Introducing CPI to your organization and obtaining buy-in at the strategic level
Replicating your transactional processes
How an oversight organization can affect processes not directly under their control
What are the lessons-learned from implementation and how you can use them to drive change in your own IT departments?
Overcoming the resistance to change: Approaching CPI at the point of pain to make LSS a benefit not an additional burden

Ronald Richardson
Program Manager Continuous Improvement
DoD CIO

Learn the best sequence of tools to use in order to maximize your program results! In this hands-on dynamic deployment simulation you will have the opportunity to work as a team to diagnose a business process, choose from a set of potentially applicable tools, install these tools and refine their application as the business runs multiple cycles.

The greatest results of a Lean Sigma deployment are the result of using the right tools at the right time. This interactive group exercise will challenge your ability to identify opportunities and drive consensus and team mobilization on a short timeline.

Hands-on dynamic simulation driving continuous improvement throughout the organization
Multiple Lean tools at work, performance tracked and scored for your review
Real-world application of supplier alignment, materials replenishment and trigger systems
Identifying the difference between Kaizens and Projects, who should own initiatives and how to measure the results

Joe Costello
VP of Operations
Sigma Breakthrough Technologies Inc.

6.30 Welcome cocktail reception

Please join the host i-nexus for drinks and canapés for the opening networking event of the Week.
Drinks reception sponsored by i- nexus

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