Activplant Corporation continued its North American Activate 2007 Executive Tour at the DePaul University in Chicago; executives representing a cross section of the manufacturing sector filled the room to share in this event. Speakers included CEO and owner of The Paranet Group, Linda Kiedrowski and Dennis Cocco, Founder and Chief Product Strategies of Activplant Corporation.

The day opened with a networking session over breakfast and Joe Loridas, Activplant's VP of Sales welcoming guests. Joe set the stage by providing an overview of Activplant and the performance management software space.

 

Dennis Cocco delivered a keynote challenging the manufacturers in the room to stop listening to the hundreds of other software companies touting manufacturing information management systems and focus only on the information that can improve your plant’s ability to produce quality product out the door. "All other information is just noise; its about choosing the right data points that focus your improvement efforts on improving the velocity of the entire system, if the data your managing doesn’t result in complete system wide improvement its like pushing a rope”. Cocco’s call to action was clear: identify your top chronic disruptors to product flow and focus your efforts on reducing them or eliminating them completely. “We developed an application - the Activplant Throughput Analyzer - to fill a gap in the industry; it’s the only application of its kind that requires three to five bits of data from your resources to provide an un-biased view of those chronic disruptors." Mr. Cocco presented several real world case studies to demonstrate the power of Throughput Analyzer and how simple tweaks in process and focusing on the chronic constraint resulted in significant increases to overall performance improvement.

 

Linda Kiedrowski discussed Getting Serious About Lean Culture Implementation. The Paranet Group, an organization of manufacturing companies guides its membership towards excellence through lean principles and change management. Linda not only highlighted why lean implementations fail through the "5 Temptations" but also provided the audience with a list of success tips to overcome these temptations and continue down a path of successful lean manufacturing. Linda demonstrated that lean implementation is not just about polices but about culture and management. She believes that these changes in conjunction with software that supports and accelerates these new strategies, like Throughput Analyzer, will aid in the adoption and acceptance of a plant's lean implementation.

 

The day ended with an engaging Q&A session and continued with one-on-one conversations with the speakers. Attendees rated the event overall as extremely valuable, one attendee was quoted, “I get so many of requests to attend events, after this morning I am glad I came, this was a valuable conference. The presentations were informational and relevant to my job”. An executive from a major pharma company said, “Our group sees the value of Activplant’s Throughput Analyzer so we brought our team and a few folks from another division to today’s session. Focusing improvement efforts on constraints is a corporate culture that all manufacturers should adopt.”

Many thanks go out to our evernt partner: The Paranet Group and the staff at the DePaul University.

     

To find out more about the Chicago event download the speakers' PowerPoint presentations. Be sure to check out our other Activate cities on the Activate website.

See you next time!

Activplant Corporation
activate@activplant.com