Improve Your Lean Culture by Focusing on Employees

As companies continue through their lean journey, it’s too easy for seasoned employees to revert back to the old way of doing things.  But experienced employees are the keys to success too, because their influence can drive improvements to the business.

This webinar focuses on three different people aspects within a manufacturing facility – teams, individuals, and leadership.  Machelle Cox and Sharon McCall, practitioners for Nutrilite dietary supplements, take you through a detailed list of practices their company uses.  They share real world suggestions and tools they use to drive continuous improvement within each of these three groups.

Focus on teams:

• Use of SQCD boards, kaizen newspapers, and a lean problem solving toolbox
• How quarterly award winners are selected
• End of year recognition for winning teams

Focus on individuals:

• Empowerment to stop processes to prevent defects
• Peer recognition
• Using suggestion impact matrix boards
• Lean continuing education -- practices used

Focus on leadership:

• Individual development plans
• Making leadership accessible to the employees

Speakers

Jill Jusko
Senior Editor
IndustryWeek

Senior Editor Jill Jusko covers strategies and best practices in manufacturing workforce and operations leadership. She provides information about workforce compensation strategies, education and training, employee engagement and retention, and teamwork. Her coverage of operations excellence spotlights companies that have achieved world-class results in quality, productivity, cost and other benchmarks by implementing the latest continuous improvement and lean/Six Sigma strategies.

Jill also coordinates IndustryWeek’s Best Plants Awards Program, which annually salutes the leading manufacturing facilities in North America.

Jill has also served as the editorial project director for the IW/MPI Census of Manufacturers. She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Bowling Green State University.

Machelle Cox
Senior Strategic Scheduler, Nutrilite
Amway Corp.

Machelle Cox has worked at Nutrilite for 25 years.  She started in manufacturing and has been cross trained in all areas of tablet production.  She spent seven years working in the supply chain planning department as a tablet production planner.  As manufacturing moved toward creating a lean environment, her skills and knowledge of the supply chain have been beneficial in her current role as manufacturing scheduler, leading the lean way to continuous improvement.  She has been green belt certified and actively leads and participates in lean projects such as right-sizing production batches, streamlining order processing, level scheduling, paperwork elimination, and developing systems for continuous flow.  Cox received her AME Bronze certification in 2011.  She also champions the company's manufacturing rewards and recognition program.


Sharon McCall
Value Stream Manager, Nutrition Double & Triple X Products
Amway Corp.

Sharon McCall has worked in the dietary supplement industry for 12 years.  Since her days in R&D and project management, she has focused on improving processes.  For the last four years, she has been in manufacturing operations.  Through coaching and gemba she engages her teams in a lean cultural revolution, pioneering new techniques that are rolled out to the rest of tablet manufacturing.  McCall also acts as value chain manager for the products manufactured in the cells -- ensuring that quality, cost and delivery issues are resolved.  Her passion is for continuous improvement and developing people into high-potential leaders.

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