February 2008 Membership Meeting

Before and after dinner presentations by Kevin McManus, Performance Improvement Coach, Great Systems!

Session I: Pursuing Process Excellence – What’s Holding You Back?

Session II: Process Excellence from the Inside Out – Who Needs Top-Down Support?

Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Engineers’ Club of St. Louis
4359 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63108
(314) 533-9333

• 5:30 – 6:00 pm: Registration & Social
• 6:00 – 7:00 pm: First Session – Pursuing Process Excellence by Kevin McManus
• 7:00 – 8:00 pm: Dinner & Section Business
• 8:00 – 9:00 pm: Second Session – Process Excellence from the Inside Out by Kevin McManus

Please register by Monday February 18 by visiting the online registration page (click here). You can prepay for membership meetings via credit card on safe and secure web environment.

Members registering and pre-paying online are entitled to a $5 discount, which brings the meeting fee down to $20.

You can also send an email to registration@asqstlouis.org, call the Engineers’ Club of St. Louis at (314) 533-9333 or send a fax to (314) 533-9336.

Map to Engineers' Club of St. Louis

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Driving Directions
From Lambert International Airport to Engineers’ Club of St. Louis

1. Head toward the I-70E entry ramp and go onto I-70E - go 0.7 mi
2. Take exit 238B to merge onto I-170 S - go 7.9 mi
3. Take exit 1A to merge onto I-64 E/US-40 E toward St Louis - go 4.7 mi
4. Take exit 36B for Kingshighway N - go 0.2 mi
5. Merge onto S Kingshighway Blvd - go 0.9 mi
6. Turn right at Lindell Blvd - go 0.7 m
7. Arrive at 4359 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63108

February 19, 2008 Membership Meeting Highlights

Before-Dinner Presentation (Session I)

Pursuing Process Excellence – What’s Holding You Back?

Presented by Kevin McManus
Performance Improvement Coach, Great Systems

Most organizations want to go faster – they want to reduce accidents and errors, improve customer satisfaction, and reach higher levels of performance in general. Unfortunately, many struggle to attain, let alone sustain, process excellence, in spite of their efforts to install improvement approaches such as six sigma and lean practices. What’s holding them back?

With most implementation efforts, project teams and training courses are used to drive the performance improvement initiative. While a project team approach, where a select percentage of employees regularly participate in improvement activities, can deliver significant short term gains, it is not enough to either build the use of these techniques into an organization’s work culture or create a way of doing work that is sustainable over the long term.

The small percentage of truly high performance organizations that exists has figured this out. They realize that sustained success over time cannot be realized by relying on project teams and training alone. Instead, they design their work systems to make it mandatory that each employee, and in particular, each process owner, both learn these skills and use them on a daily basis. This presentation will help you create a plan for making such changes yourself.

After-Dinner Presentation (Session II)

Process Excellence from the Inside Out – Who Needs Top-Down Support?

Presented by Kevin McManus
Performance Improvement Coach, Great Systems

While it may be frustrating to do, you can make change happen within your own sphere of influence even when those you report to don’t support you, or when the executive team won’t support an organization wide process excellence initiative. By using the basic tools that high performance companies regularly use on those processes you can directly influence, you can both improve your own understanding of how these tools can work and help demonstrate to others that effective tool use does make a difference.

The personal pursuit of process excellence is really not that complicated. All you really need to do is define those processes you own, the customers of those processes, the counts and measures that are needed to gauge process improvement, and the waste streams that are preventing you from attaining higher levels of performance. Once you have done this, you can find the root causes of that waste, implement corrective actions to address those root causes, and continue to measure process performance to see if your changes are having the desired effects.

In this workshop, you will set up the basic process definition and measurement tools that are needed to drive process excellence from the inside out.

Workshop Objectives:

In this workshop, you will learn how to:

• Use a process definition matrix to define your key processes
• Set up a spreadsheet for tracking and trending the performance of any process
• Define a waste incident database to help you find high leverage waste areas
• Create a plan for addressing your key process problems

About the Speaker

Kevin McManus is a performance improvement coach for Great Systems! and an international trainer for the TapRooT root cause analysis process. During his twenty six years in the business world, he has served as an Industrial Engineer, Training Manager, Production Manager, Plant Manager, and Director of Quality.

He holds an undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering and a MBA. Kevin has been a member of IIE for more than twenty-six years,and has served as Senior VP of Continuing Education on the IIE Board of Trustees. He has served as an Examiner and Senior Examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for eight years. Kevin also writes the monthly performance improvement column for Industrial Engineer magazine, and he has published a book entitled “You Can’t Win Indy in an Edsel – How to Develop a High Performance Work Culture.”