Pre-conference Workshops

Toyota Kata: "Improving and Coaching Your Way to Success"
8 a.m. - 5 p.m., Sept. 23

Instructors: Bill Kraus, Brandon Brown, Arkansas Manufacturing Solutions and Hank Czarnecki, Auburn Technical Assistance Center

This workshop adapts the “Buzz Electronics” manufacturing simulation, used extensively by NIST MEP practitioners, to effectively demonstrate the Improvement and Coaching Katas. This workshop has been adopted by several large companies as the standard way to roll out Toyota Kata within their organization.

This eight-hour, hands-on workshop, will involve:

• Presentation of the Toyota Kata Methodology utilizing Mike Rother’s “Toyota Kata Handbook” materials.
• Participation in the Buzz Electronics Improvement Kata simulation that brings Rother’s material “to life” as team members PDCA their way through the Kata process en route toward a Challenge and Target Conditions.
• Experiencing a Coaching Kata session that makes clear how the Learner, 1^st Coach and 2^nd Coach interact so effectively. 
• Explanation and examples linking  Vision, achievable Challenges and short term Target Conditions, in addition to the planning necessary with an Advance Group Overview. 

Toyota Kata addresses the question “How can we lead our companies so they will survive and thrive in the long term?” Since the future lies beyond what we can see, the solutions that we employ today may not continue to be effective. So it is not the solutions themselves – whether Lean techniques, today’s profitable product, or any other – that provide sustained competitive advantage, but rather the ability to understand conditions and create fitting, smart solutions. Toyota Kata is the routine to develop this capability in the organization, and is both a key factor in Toyota’s long-running success and a core responsibility of its leadership. Two specific behavior routines or Kata: the Improvement Kata – a repeating routine of establishing challenging target conditions, working step-by-step through obstacles, and always learning from the problems we encounter. The Coaching Kata is a pattern of teaching the improvement kata to employees at every level to ensure that it motivates their ways of thinking and acting.  This workshop is for all who are searching for a better way to lead, manage and develop people, which produce continuous improvement, adaptation, survival, and superior results.  Briefly put – Toyota Kata channels and utilizes the capabilities of all its members better than we do with our traditional management methods.

Specific Learning Objectives 

As such, this one day workshop will provide participants an opportunity to begin to learn how to:

1. Apply the Toyota Kata methodologies, models and tools regarding:
   The Improvement Kata:  A scientific 4-step iterative PDCA routine that addresses only those obstacles on the path of a trajectory leading to the achievement of short term Target Conditions that are in line with a long term Vision/Challenge.
   The Coaching Kata:  A daily routine utilizing 5 Coaching Kata Questions to help teach the Improvement Kata thinking pattern and ensure it is imbedded within an organization via team accountability.
2. Recognize the value of the Coaching Kata Methodology (i.e., how the Value Adders, Learner and 1st and 2nd Coaches interact)  via the 5 Toyota Kata Questions
3. Participate in a 4-round “Buzz Electronics” simulation that is progressively interwoven in with the methodologies to make it easy to understand how the Toyota Kata Trajectory components come together (i.e., Vision/Challenge, Current Condition, Target Condition, Obstacles, PCDAs and Coaching).
4. Gain a continuous improvement view of how the Toyota Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata can be used in conjunction with the Lean 101 “Buzz Electronics” simulation to help enhance the learning of these methodologies.

Participate in Q&A and Best Practices round table discussions about how participants can utilize the Toyota Kata methodologies to further reignite their company’s Continuous Innovation Journeys.

About the instructors
Bill Kraus serves as a project manager with Arkansas Manufacturing Solutions in the delivery of services to the state’s manufacturers. He provides training, implementation and coaching support in the primary areas of lean manufacturing, training within industry and Toyota kata. He has a B.S. in civil engineering from Christian Brothers University and an M.S. in engineering administration from the University of Tennessee. He is also the immediate past president of the AME SE Region.

Brandon Brown, P.E., is a business development consultant for Arkansas Manufacturing Solutions (AMS), the state’s NIST/MEP Center.  He has led several Toyota kata and Kaizen improvement initiatives is his 20 year career.  He has a BSME and MSE from the University of Arkansas.  He currently teaches graduate level courses at the University of Arkansas in Operations Management. Prior to joining AMS, he launched several new products throughout his career and started two manufacturing facilities.  He advanced through management leadership at Central States Mfg., as regional operations manager, managing three facilities in the Eastern Region, which serves 16 Midwest and southeastern states.  He led a team for site selection of their two recent plant expansions in the southeast from 2006 through 2010. Brandon served on the Governor’s Workforce Development Taskforce, Region IV, for the State of Alabama.  His project management career includes over $15M in expansion and cost reduction initiatives.  His passion remains in developing people to succeed with Innovation, Continuous Improvement, and Leadership. 

Hank Czarnecki serves as lean group leader for Auburn University's Technical Assistance Program. Hank has more than 15 years of experience teaching lean, facilitating kaizen improvement events and coaching companies on their lean journey. Hank has earned a B.S. in industrial engineering, University of Pittsburgh and a master industrial engineering, Auburn University. He is currently AME SE Region vice president of programs and a certified training within industry instructor. 

Analytics-Based Enterprise Performance Management – Making it Work 

8 a.m.- 5 p.m., Sept. 23

Instructor: Gary Cokins, CMIP, founder, Analytics-Based Performance Management 

Many organizations are far from where they want and need to be with improving performance, and they apply intuition, rather than hard data, when making decisions. Enterprise performance management (EPM) is now viewed as the seamless integration of managerial methodologies such as balanced scorecards, strategy maps, risk management, driver-based budgets, rolling financial forecasts, activity-based costing (ABC), customer relationship and value management, lean and Six Sigma quality management, and resource capacity planning. Each one should be embedded with business analytics of all flavors, such as correlation and regression analysis, and especially predictive analytics.This workshop will describe how to complete the full vision of analytics-based enterprise performance management.

Workshop objectives: 

• How strategy maps and their companion balanced scorecards communicate strategic objectives with target-setting to help cross-functional employee teams align their behavior to the strategy and better collaborate.
• Why measures of channel and customer profitability and customer value are now superseding profit and service-line measures – and shifting from product to customer-focused organizations including future potential value – customer lifetime value.
• How activity-based cost management (ABC/M) provides not only accurately traced calculated costs (relative to arbitrary broad-averaged cost allocations), but more importantly provides cost transparency back to the work processes and consumed resources, and to what drivers cause work activities.
• Reforming the broken annual budgeting process with performance based budgeting that links strategy to operations and is process volume sensitive rather than simply incremental at each cost center.
• Why business analytics, with emphasis on predictive analytics and pro-active decision making, is becoming a competitive advantage differentiator and an enabler for trade-off analysis.
• How all levels of management can quickly see and assess how they are doing on what is important – typically with only a maximum of three key performance indicators (KPIs).
• How to integrate performance measurement scorecards and ABC/M data with:

1. Strategy formulation.
2. Process-based thinking and operational productivity improvement.
3. Channel/customer profitability and value analysis and CRM.
4. Supply chain management.
5. Quality and lean management (Six Sigma cost of quality).  

About the instructor
Gary Cokins is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, and author in advanced cost management and performance improvement systems. He is the founder of Analytics-Based Performance Management, an advisory firm located in Cary, N.C., at www.garycokins.com. Gary received a BS degree with honors in Industrial Engineering/Operations Research from Cornell University in 1971. He received his MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in 1974.

Gary began his career as a strategic planner with FMC’s Link-Belt Division and then served as Financial Controller and Operations Manager. In 1981 Gary began his management consulting career first with Deloitte Consulting. Then KPMG (1988), where he was trained on ABC by Harvard Business School Professors Robert S. Kaplan and Robin Cooper and in 1992 Gary headed the National Cost Management Consulting Services for Electronic Data Systems (EDS) now part of HP. From 1997 until recently Gary was in business development with SAS, a leading provider of enterprise performance management and business analytics and intelligence software.