MWS-18

lnu Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced

Competitive Action

10% or Die...
Designing Manufacturing, Product Development, and Office Processes to Survive and Thrive in a Brutal Global Marketplace.

Top global companies increase the ratio of their value offering to costs at the rate of 7 - 10% per year. To survive and thrive, western businesses must achieve at least 10% per year and to achieve 10% they must continuously improve on three levels:

Strategic Kaizens and Breakthrough Projects that produce 6-8% per year overall improvement are the focus of this workshop.

Applying Lean Tools and Models and performing continual Kaizen events won’t get you 10%. Deep under the surface of the best practices (including Toyota ’s JIT and Jidoka) are a set of timeless laws and principles that govern all changes. Lack of expertise in these laws and principles often leads to failure or a major setback.

To achieve 10%, you must:

This workshop is designed to deliver more than just Lean tools & models. Jim Swartz, a pioneer in the Lean movement, will take you to the next level. He uses actual case histories from the hundreds he has led to demonstrate what it takes to achieve 10% per year.

James B. Swartz

Jim is recognized as a pioneer in the Lean movement. His Lean journey began in 1976 when he became manager of a $200 million manufacturing plant. Faced with intense competition, he and his management team made frequent visits to Toyota, Toyota’s suppliers, GE, and other great manufacturing plants. They successfully adopted JIT and Jidoka in their plant from 1978 to 1982.

In the past twenty years, he has led or facilitated over 500 successful transformations of manufacturing, engineering and business systems in over 50 corporations worldwide. He encourages organizations to set a goal of 10% per year increase in their value-to-cost offering. He then teaches them the basic concepts, laws, patterns, and principles that are behind the best Lean tools and models. He teaches a tri-level improvement model for achieving 10% per year. He helps them change their focus from solving low-leverage presented problems to finding and seizing high-leverage Lean opportunities (opportunities that have high present value and high ROI). He coaches leaders in how to mobilize people to willingly invest their time, energy and resources to find the Lean opportunities and then rapidly and safely seize them.

He has conducted hundreds of hands-on/interactive workshops on TPS, Lean Manufacturing, Fast Time to Market, Overcoming Obstacles to Lean, The Lean Office, The Lean Enterprise, and High Leverage Leadership.

Jim has a Masters in Physics from the University of Illinois as a Bardeen Fellow.