The Institute for Operational Excellence Speaks at a Conference in Poland

MAY 10, 2008 -- Kevin Duggan, founder of the IOE was recently the keynote speaker at the executive conference for Colep CCL. The conference was held in Poland and was attended by over 100 executives and leaders of Colep, who has embarked on a journey to operational excellence. Colep has already been using lean tools to obtain process improvements and has progressed well on their journey. They have also adopted operational excellence to foster perfection and add value to their clients. Kevin built upon their success by teaching how the lean tools are applied in order to obtain operational excellence. Kevin explained to the group it is not just about continuous improvement or value streams, it is about creating value streams that flow at customer demand, and having these value streams ‘self-heal’ before when (or before) they break down. Self healing value streams provides a flow of products to customers with very little management involvement or decisions.  This results in freeing up management and leaders to work on offense, or growing the business. After explaining the concepts of value streams and the process to build them and use them to create operational excellence, Kevin provided a slide show of these techniques in action. The slide show depicted pictures of companies who have adopted operational excellence in order to show these principles in real life.

 The result of the session was significant insights on the deeper meaning of lean, and how to use true lean principles to build operational excellence into an organization. The management team of Colep found it not only educational and insightful, but motivational as well. Colep will be applying the thinking they learned in this session to their operation to accelerate their lean journey, as they now know where their lean journey will take them. Knowing that the lean journey will take them to operational excellence and exactly what operational excellence is will get them there faster.