TweetThe last session of the day at Forrester Business Process Forum (and the last for me, since I’m headed home tonight) is Alexander Peters on increasing business value from customer-centric business processes. Looking at a case study from the energy trading and retail sector, he described how the speed of change requires new ways of [...]
Tagged BPF11TweetJohn Bates started with more of the Progress message on operational responsiveness, highlighting the importance of process and event management in this. He showed survey results stating that companies find it critical to respond to problematic events in real time, but only a small percentage are able to actually do that. Companies want real-time business [...]
TweetI scored the “Keys to Success” list that Gary Kucera made for the wrap-up session (unedited): Canadian Pacific Railway (Jeff Adams): Cultivate Business Relationships: Create a 2010 “Relationship” strategy plan to build relationships with the “right” people who will help advocate and drive Process Improvement results Target “thought” leaders to cultivate process improvement influence Hand [...]
Tagged LSS&PITweetThe final session was supposed to be a brainstorming session with Debra Yeager of Xerox Canada and Gary Kucera of Kaplan Higher Education, working with us to come up with a list of LSS and process improvement ideas that can have maximum impact within an organization, but was really the points that they gleaned from [...]
Tagged LSS&PITweetRick Hefner of Northrop Grumman gave the last full presentation of the conference before the brainstorming and wrapup. At this point in the schedule, a lot of the material that he was going to cover has already been said, leaving him free to ignore most of his slides and give more of an anecdotal talk [...]
Tagged LSS&PITweetChris Rocke and Jane Long from Whirlpool presented on their experiences with integrating LSS tools into BPM practices to move beyond traditional process mapping. Whirlpool is a mature Six Sigma company: starting in their manufacturing areas, it has spread to all other functions, and they’ve insourced their own training certification program. Six Sigma is not [...]
Tagged LSS&PITweetLast up before lunch was Sarah Snyder, who works with the US Army, discussing how they use dashboards to measure and tune their performance. The examples that she showed were not about the actual “business” processes, however, but measures on LSS projects, such as initiated and completed projects, LSS training, LSS belt utilization, and other [...]
Tagged LSS&PITweetDavid Haigh of Johnson & Johnson presented on how they’re using dashboards in their process improvement efforts; this is much further into my comfort zone, since dashboards are an integral part of any BPM implementation. He’s part of the consumer products division rather than pharmaceutical or medical: lots of name brands that we all see [...]
Tagged LSS&PITweetNot surprisingly, this conference is as much or more about the cultural aspects of LSS as the techniques and tools, and Jason Schulist of DTE Energy (a US utility company) gave a presentation on their continuous improvement journey. They’ve been at LSS for more than 10 years, starting with Kaizen in 1998, moving into Six [...]
Tagged LSS&PITweetI’m a bit better prepared for today’s conference: first of all, I showed up on time, and secondly, I have my iPhone tethering cable so that I can post even though there’s no open wifi here. Today opened with a recap of yesterday’s session by Charles Spina of e-Zsigma, the conference chair, then he had [...]
Tagged LSS&PITweetLast session of the day is Jennifer Thompson of Royal Bank of Canada on process improvement culture within an organization: how to maintain a relevant Six Sigma culture in changing economic times, and how to keep people engaged in the program. RBC is Canada’s largest bank, with 80,000 people in 50 countries; they were a [...]
Tagged LSS&PITweetTom Kling, who has the most magnificent mustache this side of the 19th century, talked to us about TRIZ: an acronym that most of us in the room had never heard of, much less used. I confess, I Googled it before the session, so knew that it was related to innovation – it’s also known [...]
Tagged LSS&PITweetNext up was a panel discussion with David Haigh of Johnson & Johnson, Sabrina Lemos of United Airlines, and Gary Kucera of Kaplan Higher Education, moderated by Charles Spina of e-Zsigma. United Airlines has a unique project going on in one of their freight-related operations: they decided to outsource the operation in order to be [...]
Tagged LSS&PITweetI missed the first morning of the IQPC Lean Six Sigma & Process Improvement conference in Toronto today, but with my usual impeccable timing, showed up just in time for lunch (where we had to explain the rules of curling to the American attendees). The first session this afternoon is with David Brown, a black [...]
Tagged LSS&PITweetConnie Moore moderated a panel on automating business processes, featuring David Knapp of Ford, Pamela Rucker of Philip Services and Theo van den Hurk of ABN AMRO. The room is considerably less crowded than this morning, so I’m guessing that there’s some golfing going on (probably all the CIOs whose golf games were rained out last week [...]
TweetLast speaker of the day — and of the conference — was David Haigh, Global Director of Continuous Improvement at W.E.T. Automotive Systems, discussing Lean Product Development. It’s actually refreshing to be at a BPM conference where I’m the only person that I heard (since I missed Jodi Starkman-Mendelsohn’s talk this morning) that talked about [...]
TweetCompletely non-Enterprise 2.0, except for the fact that I heard this at lunch today from someone who works for a large financial services organization: 3M may ditch their Six Sigma program because they find that it stifles creativity. To quote Charles O’Reilly, a Stanford Graduate School of Business management professor, “If you take over a [...]
TweetThe second keynote speaker of the day is Bruce Williams of Savvi International, author of Six Sigma for Dummies (and the accompanying workbook) and Lean for Dummies, speaking on What BPM Means to Business Innovation. Funny, at last year’s Gartner BPM summit, everything was about Six Sigma; this year, this is the first time that [...]
TweetMaybe it’s the January blahs. Maybe I’ve seen too many of these things. Maybe they actually were as bad as I perceived. Maybe I’m just cranky because I’m missing Mashup Camp. In any case, I was not impressed by either of the two webinars that I sat in on today. Making Your People More Effective [...]
TweetDay 2 of the Proforma conference included three additional customer presentations, one from a partner, then all the exciting stuff about the upcoming product release. Following on the heels of the panel at the end of day 1, in which Paul Harmon and Geary Rummler slammed Six Sigma, Deb Berard from Seagate spoke about their [...]
