American Society for Quality Conference
Customer-Supplier Relationship Symposium, Phoenix, AZ
Friday, February 23, 2007
 

Profero Presentation: "Lean Supply Chain: Lean for Us and Them"
 

During the February 2007 American Society for Quality (ASQ) Conference in Phoenix, AZ, Profero ”Catalyst” Tony Manos gave a presentation on Lean Supply Chain called ”Lean Supply Chain: Lean for Us and Them.”

Manos’s presentation was billed as part of ASQ’s larger mission ”to explore the many changes and trends in customer-supplier relationships.” Manos’s materials focused on how to build an effective Lean supply chain and how to negotiate and rectify supply chain challenges.

One attendee was Benjamin Le, Quality Assurance Analyst for Office Depot. The new information that he took away from the presentation was ”A better understanding of 5S ”

Since Le’s area is quality assurance, he continually deals with products and manufacturers, so if a product failure occurs, he has to go through the entire corrective process. Because of this, his company is seeking to apply batch concepts to the process, and Lean concepts are a particularly good fit because of their consistent, ”across-theboard” nature. ”Right now we're working retroactively,” he explains, ”so it's only when ”

Le was pleased and surprised with his level of engagement with Manos’s presentation. ”I've attended a number of different conferences and Tony’s presentation went above and beyond what I'm used to. He used all sorts of graphics, and the materials were very descriptive and really helped you understand the ”flow” of things.” Especially with value stream mapping, Le says. ”The way Manos presented the VSM materials-using options like Power Point and other visuals-was very unique and powerful. It was a long conference and because of Tony's approach, his presentation was a breath of fresh air.”

For the .pdf version of this announcement please click here.