Partners in Business
3520 Old Main Hill
Logan, UT 84322-3520
Phone: 435.797.2279
Fax: 435.797.3440
Email: partners@usu.edu
Latest Blog Entries
- October 15, 2009
- Never a Losing Season
- August 24, 2009
- Connect yourself and your business to the digital world
- August 06, 2009
- How Stable is Your Financial Structure?
Operational Excellence Speakers
Keynote Speakers
Matthew May
Author
"Creating Elegant Ideas"
Matthew May is the author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing and Elegant Solutions: Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way, the Elegant Solutions blog, and The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation (Free Press, 2006), which drew on his over eight years of experience as a former senior advisor and master instructor at Toyota. He has contributed to or written for Strategy & Business, Across the Board, The American, The Wharton Leadership Digest, Quality Progress, Consulting to Management, The Detroit News, The Detroit Free Press, and USA Today. Matt is the director of the consulting and education firm, Aevitas Learning & Innovation and holds an MBA from The Wharton School and a BA from Johns Hopkins University. (more...)
Norman Bodek
President, PCS Press
"Developing People"
Norman Bodek is president of PCS Press, a Vancouver, Washington, publishing, training, and consulting company. He discovered and published the works of the truly great Japanese manufacturing geniuses: Dr. Shigeo Shingo and Taiichi Ohno, the inventors of the Toyota Production System now called JIT and Lean manufacturing and many others. From his numerous trips to Japan he introduced to the western world the Kaizen Blitz, SMED, TPM, QFD, Hoshin Kanri, Poka-Yoke, Visual Factory and other new manufacturing methodologies that have helped companies improve their quality, and productivity. In 1988 he initiated the Shingo Prize for Manufacturing Excellence with Professor Vern Buehler at Utah State University.(more...)
David Meier
Author, Trainer, Speaker
"Developing a Kaizen Culture The Toyota Way"
David Meier is an internationally recognized authority on Lean Manufacturing and The Toyota Production System (TPS). David is the co-author of the best selling books, The Toyota Way Fieldbook, (McGraw-Hill, 2005), and Toyota Talent, (McGraw-Hill, 2007) with Jeffrey Liker. In these hands-on books David and Jeff detail the language, concepts, and tools that managers need to bring Toyota’s success-proven practices to life in any organization. (more...)
Bruce Hamilton
President, Greater Boston Manufacturing Partnership/Vice Chair, Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence
"Asking The Right Questions: Management’s Key to Lean Transformation"
Bruce Hamilton brings hands-on experience to GBMP as a manager, teacher, and change agent. He has spoken internationally on Lean Manufacturing, employee involvement, continuous improvement and implementing change, and has contributed to numerous texts on reliable methods ranging from visual control to variety reduction. (more...)
Gwendolyn Galsworth
President, Quality Methods International Inc.
"The Visual Workplace: Where What IS Suppose to Happen, Does Happen"
Gwendolyn D. Galsworth, Ph.D., is an educator, implementer, and a researcher with more than 25 years in the field of Workplace Visuality. Considered by many a leading visual expert, Dr. Galsworth is the author of a number of books on organizational improvement and workplace visuality, including Visual Workplace/Visual Thinking, recipient of the Shingo Prize for Research. (more...)
Jacob Raymer
Asst. Director of Education, The Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence
"A Principle-Centered Approach to Business Improvement"
Mr. Jacob Raymer is assistant director of Lean Education for The Shingo Prize at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, Utah State University. The Shingo Prize is regarded as the premier operational excellence award and recognition program in the world, with Business Week dubbing The Shingo Prize as “the Nobel Prize of Manufacturing.”
In his current position, Jacob oversees the development of the framework and architecture of The Shingo Prize learning management system. He is also deeply involved in the creation of lean coursework, simulations, and workshops. Jacob leads the development and training of The Shingo Prize examiners (more..)
Breakout Speakers
Randy Russell
CEO & Managing Consultant, Hyperformance Enterprises, LLC/ Former Commanding Officer of Continuous Improvement, Jacksonville Sheriff's Office
"A Leaner Approach to Policing"
Lt. Randy Russell recently retired as a 21-year veteran of the Jacksonville (FL) Sheriff's Office (JSO), where from 2005-2008 he served as the Commanding Officer of Continuous Improvement. In this first-of-its-kind role, he championed the strategy development and deployment of Lean and Continuous Improvement throughout the 3,200-employee JSO organization, which serves 1 million people in the largest land area (840 sq. mi) of any city in the continental U.S. (more...)
Gary Peterson
Vice President, Manufacturing Support Services
O.C. Tanner Company
"From Batch to Flow in a High Mix/High Volume Environment"
Gary has worked for The O.C. Tanner Company for 22 years. His current assignment is Vice President, Manufacturing Support Services.Prior to working in his current role Gary has held an impressively diverse set of jobs with the O.C. Tanner Company, including Manufacturing Change Facilitator (where he was instrumental in moving the operation from “batch” to lean, resulting in their winning the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing), Vice President of Manufacturing, Marketing Vice President of Award Development, and Vice President of Research and Professional Services. (more...)
Naida Grunden
Author of The Pittsburgh Way to Efficient Healthcare
"Lean Healthcare: What is Possible?"
A professional writer for over 20 years, Naida Grunden has spent the last decade documenting Lean/Toyota improvements in the health care setting. Ms. Grunden also shares an interest in applying what has been learned in aviation safety and reliability to healthcare. In addition to writing numerous general and academic articles, Ms. Grunden wrote the book, The Pittsburgh Way to Efficient Healthcare, which describes the work of the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative (PRHI), a small nonprofit organization, which began in 2001 to pilot Lean experiments in competing hospitals across Southwestern Pennsylvania. The effort produced some of the first genuine, on-the-ground evidence that a Toyota-based industrial model could work in health care. (more...)
