10th Annual Quality Excellence Conference
Overview
How Process Improvement Leaders Produce Profits in Recessions
Sept 22-24, 2008
Process Improvement leaders working through Quality, Process, Lean and Six Sigma improvement approaches – are “switch hitters!” They apply improvement tactics to top-line growth during economic expansions and cost-reduction during recessions. In the current economic slow-down, productivity innovators find ways to proactively manage costs down and profits up.
During the global economic downturn, market leaders nimbly turn their productivity programs to re-think operating procedures and find new ways to reduce costs and sustain growth. Turn-around experts contend most companies operate routinely with inefficiencies reaching up to 30% of costs! The holy grail of productivity is to proactively reduce waste and inefficiencies – without hurting growth drivers.
Effective cost management and savvy implementation of diverse process improvement tools are the central themes for the Global Benchmarking Council’s 10th Annual Quality Excellence, a networking conference for executives working in business planning, strategy, quality, six sigma, productivity improvement or operations management. Through candid case examples from Fortune 100 companies, forward-looking field research, roundtable discussions, and panel briefings from nimble market leaders, this conference will share cost reduction excellence and productivity-improvement insights, best practices, winning strategies, lessons learned and case studies across pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device, financial services, technology and other industries : Together, Global Benchmarking Council members and invited guests will share their successes and opportunity fronts for:
• New cost reduction opportunities
• Developing Cost Discipline while growing
• Finding new opportunities for efficiency in Supply Chain Management
• Cost Improvement Opportunities in R&D and Commercial Operations that won’t hurt growth
• Reducing Cost with Offshore Strategies Without Creating Product Quality and Safety Risks
• And much more . . .
CONFERENCE SPEAKERS
The following companies will be presenting best practice case studies at this quality excellence conference.
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Johnson & Johnson
TBA
Mina Ghajar, Vice President of Quality
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Hewlett Packard
Reducing Expense While Improving Quality
Wendell Sharpe, WW-Global Delivery Foundation Services, Quality Manager
Almost an oxymoron, reducing the cost of running a business as large as Hewlett-Packard while improving quality is a challenging requirement in the face of economic turndown. In this presentation, we will review how HP is doing just that. HP is reducing expense while improving quality through various Lean Sigma tools and methodologies, with teams throughout HP to develop cost reduction models that check the affects on quality before enacting to ensure the customer’s experience improves.
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FedEx
TBA
Kathy Bergeson, FedEx Corporate Advisor/ Service Assurance and Quality
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Nortel
The Critical Link Between Quality Excellence and Customer Satisfaction
Ellen Bovarnick, Vice President Lean Six Sigma
Ellen's presentation will be focused on the customer satisfaction aspects of quality excellence. She will also elaborate upon the importance of taking the steps towards improving internal processes with the customer in mind. Ellen will also discuss the slightly altered Quality model used by Nortel and share the past, present and future of Nortel's Quality initiatives.
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Dupont
Identifying Key Strategies for Growth through a Strategic Quality Assessment
Ted Brown, Lean Competency Champion
A strategic business unit within DuPont realized that quality issues were constraining current revenue and future growth. The SBU leadership was unsure about the strategies that they should pursue and asked that an assessment by conducted by subject matter experts. This presentation will describe the data-based approach to identify the root causes of chronic quality problems and the key strategies in culture, planning, and execution necessary to eliminate the root causes.
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Infratrac
Cost-Effective Product Integrity
Sharon Flank, Ph.D, CEO
Maintaining the quality of your product is not the only cost challenge: other players can affect your product integrity. Increasingly, your brand can be threatened by supplier shortcuts (as in the heparin case) or downright copying. Counterfeiting threatens your good name in the marketplace, as well as the safety of your customers. Smart brand protection efforts focus on lightweight, adaptable solutions that deter talented, well-funded counterfeiters as well as sloppier copiers. Protecting packaging is insufficient, particularly where repackaging is required for multilingual markets or single-dose administration. One-shot verification can be a key backup for chain-of-custody monitoring, when one questionable link jeopardizes the entire chain. New regulations in the works from the EU, FDA, EPA and various states suggest that nimble, multi-prong approaches offer the best strategic advantages.
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Panel Discussion
The following companies will be participating in panel discussions at this quality excellence conference.
Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems
David Carey- Director, Business Process Improvement | 
BP
Peri Kaae- Manager, Process Excellence, Indirect Procurement |
Boeing
Bill Sacherek- Benchmarking Manager |
WR Grace
John Pelton- Director, Corporate Productivity |
Motorola
Bob Yacobellis- Director, MSG Process, Quality, and Metrics (PQM) |  |
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