Is your culture what you want it to be or what you have allowed it to become? If you’re not talking about it and working on it every day, chances are it’s the latter. At the foundation of any successful company is a strong culture, driven by the spirit of continuous improvement, and powered by passionate leaders. If you’re lacking any of those elements, you’re missing an opportunity to create lasting growth with your most important asset – your people. In this presentation, Brett Wood, the President & CEO of Toyota Material Handling North America, will provide leadership principles and practices that you can implement to create a culture of continuous improvement, and he will give tangible examples of Toyota’s Kaizen culture in action.

World Economic Forum 2021 proposes a “Great Reset” across all business boundaries & dimensions. Softtek Low Touch Consulting “LTC” offers an innovation model for the new state of our economy, permanently altered by Covid-19. This disruption is creating new winners and is characterized by a frictionless flow of value models at the center of transformation. Through Softtek’s value-based client partnership model, our “LTC” offers new models of frictionless manufacturing operations. Examples include: paperless integrated systems; best-in-class linking ERP, MES, SCM and intelligent data acquisition; cognitive enterprise-wide use of predictive models; transforming plant safety operations with kiosks, touchless platforms.

Join us for an Executive Interview with Barbara Philibert, President and CEO, Industrial Technologies Group & US Wire Group at HEICO as she discusses how to drive cultural transformation.

The presentation will layout the compelling value proposition Additive Manufacturing provides for the aerospace industry. In it, I will cover the speed, cost, performance and sustainability advantages the technology provides and review real case studies Eaton Aerospace has identified. I will also give the audience a sense of how these opportunities are identified within their organizations. Finally I’ll touch on the process required to build the internal capability and market credibility required to be successful.

An engaging overview of how to improve the speed of getting new products to market from a packaging perspective. A review of how new products and packaging should be designed for ease of manufacturing, sustainability, functionality and distribution especially addressing the growth of e-commerce. Collaboration and design to meet both product and marketing goals as well as ensuring design addresses manufacturing and fulfilment as well as consumer and user requirements.

Join us for an Executive Interview with Mark Whitten, President & CEO at Spartanburg Steel Products as he discusses how leadership transformation is evolving businesses.

This presentation outlines 10 capability gaps that are needed for virtual and augmented reality solutions to reach their potential within aerospace manufacturing environments. These needs range from contamination risk mitigation to overcoming limitations and security concerns. The goal of this presentation is to find partners willing to help define the scope of the problems presented and aid in prioritizing solutions.

Karen’s company’s journey to their new mantra –Grit Matters: Perseverance, Heart & Integrity, is the reboot of their vision, mission, and values. Her role, as she puts it, is that of the gardener as as she leads the successful day-to-day operations of American Crane, a 180-person manufacturing facility headquartered in Douglassville, PA. American Crane is recognized as a leader in the design and manufacturing of cranes, hoists, and other material handling equipment.

Learn more about Karen, American Crane & Equipment Corporation, and exactly how the culture she built helped the business even during tumultuous times.

Disruption of the pandemic has been creating even more opportunities in remote patient monitoring. There are many ways that this disruption creates a ripe time for invention and creativity. I will discuss the science of skin and its influence longer-term wear of remote monitoring wearable medical devices. The benefits to the patients and the care providers to enjoy better compliance are big drivers that are changing the way healthcare will take place in the future.

AB-InBev, the world’s largest beer brewer has been transforming their entire supply chain. Innovating through discovery, development, and scaling of technology has enabled AB-InBev Brewmasters to deliver fresh beer to markets across the globe keeping sustainability as a top priority

This talk is about a subject which I am passionate about. Developing talent. This is one of the most important things leaders do and my definition of leadership is helping those around you reach their potential. I will cover three main areas of talent development. First I’ll review some of the development tools we leverage to identify and develop critical talent. Then I’ll share some of our global training tools and finally I’ll conclude with sharing some of the ways we try to provide opportunities to both broaden and deepen our talent.

Packaging Hall of Famer Dr. Michael Okoroafor sits down to chat about the current state of the manufacturing industry and what we need to consider moving forward. Prior to COVID, the trend in the manufacturing industry was how big could you get with your manufacturing infrastructure. Now as we learn to adapt, it’s important to have a nimble and flexible agile manufacturing structure and a digital platform to align processes.

Building a team, following the innovation model, and improving key systems to increase our workforce capability and deliver business results.

COMING SOON!

Please Join the CIO of Wrench Group, Robert Sheesley in this Executive Interview where he will discuss how to lead a Digital Transformation and how to navigate through the challenges and surprises along the way.

Please Join the CIO of Wrench Group, Robert Sheesley in this Executive Interview where he will discuss how to lead a Digital Transformation and how to navigate through the challenges and surprises along the way.

In this presentation, Dr. Marlene R. Kolodziej, DBA, ITIL, VP, Centralized Services, Ricoh USA, Inc. will discuss how Augmented Reality (AR) is one silver lining that has come from the pandemic and is allowing for a superior customer experience, despite the limitations of not being able to complete in-person service calls. She’ll also detail how people, technology, knowledge and process play into the delivery of a business continuity plan and use Ricoh’s response to the pandemic as an example of what worked, while also sharing lessons learned.

Providing information / experiences to fellow Tier 1 suppliers that can help them navigate the design and development process for “Build to Print” suppliers for the automotive industry. Giving participants some key steps to follow when working with a OEM on a new development in hopes that they can improve their process and have successful launches of their product.

Calculating savings for an automation project is not as simple as payback, things to consider include, direct and indirect labor, maintenance, capex, opex, materials, inflation; with this presentation you should be able to decide how to calculate the ROI of the project and get the budget to make it happen.

Join us for an Executive Interview with Donzel Leggett, Vice President of Global Manufacturing Excellence, Global Platforms & Asia/LATAM Supply Chain at General Mills, as he explains his job function and his definition of “Inspire for Breakthrough World Class Performance”.

LEGO (Business Services) is building a Culture of Operational Excellence in a very LEGO way including storytelling to build understanding and connection – Swamp to Summit, change management does exist and why it is difficult and the BSO Journey so-far and what comes next…

Join us for an Executive Interview with Allison Grealis, President and Founder of Women in Manufacturing as she discusses how to find your community and what programs are offered in the manufacturing industry.

Agility is necessary to be successful in R&D product development. We can learn this from taking a look at case studies of successful companies over time and how they’ve remained relevant as society changes. Agility, however, is usually associated with a small size, so how does a large company remain agile? Dow Inc. has successfully delivered new innovations in short times as demonstrated by its response to the pandemic with the development of PPE for the medical industry. In addition to examining the critical elements which made that possible, I will discuss my experience on leading the team through changing times and discuss 7 key components I found critical for agile product development.

As a 21st-century concept, the Digital Twin captures the idea that we are moving work from the physical world into the virtual one. It moves toward using bits, which are getting cheaper all the time, in place of atoms, which are getting more expensive. We are replacing expensive physical time, energy, and material with much cheaper digital information.
The Digital Twin is the concept driver behind Manufacturing 4.0. It moves us from a functional- centric approach to a product-centric one. It integrates manufacturing as a critical aspect of product creation, so that how to manufacture products is not an after-thought once a product is designed and engineered. It will improve both productivity and quality.

The presentation will be focused on the impacts of the COVID crisis and sociopolitical issues. I will show how the COVID crisis changed the marketplace using beer as an example, but also speak about how to motivate essential factory workers at a time when most others were working from home and how to operate in a post-COVID world. How focusing on Safety and Health as your first priority guarantees business continuity, service, quality and cost.

From Research and Development to Manufacturing, in today’s business world all functions are required to innovate. During my career I have evaluated various innovation computer programs and online services. In this presentation, we review various digital tools to assist your company innovation process.

Winning the War on Talent with a “Great Place to Work” culture.

What is “IT”? It’s not simply Information Technology. It is everything. How can you transform one part of the enterprise and not others? Do we stop with the supply chain? What about the customer experience? Transforming “IT” isn’t simply about IT and OT, it is about have the honesty to realize that for this thing to work, IT has to change.