Concurrent Sessions

Evan d’Entremont

Jill Inwood

Juliette Kerr

Rob Stephenson

Gilles Theriault

A key consensus today among most companies is the labour force challenge. Many employees have become less motivated with work today. Companies need help creating a positive and engaging workplace for people to develop their careers. LEAN can establish a progressive, proactive attitude in the workplace. It can help bring workers’ frustrations to the surface and get them addressed. 5S can help organize the workplace and keep everything in its place and this can greatly reduce stress for everyone. The training of a LEAN project is often what starts true worker involvement in improving the workplace. It provides a structure and guidelines for continuous improvement. When workers become engaged they are the best source of ideas for positive change. LEAN allows companies to establish processes to hear about product flow and shop floor issues and to take action to address them in a team setting. While the LEAN process helps the efficiency of the business, it more importantly helps make the company a much better place to work. This helps everyone’s motivation. The panel of managers from Western Nova Scotia will discuss their experiences with LEAN, some from early adoption stages, to intermediate and through to lengthy experience. Discussion will include heavy manufacturing, processing and service operations and will be moderated by Rob Stephenson of the Western REN.

Roberta Rose

Have you ever heard of the seven wastes when it comes to improvement? I am sure you have used at least one of the easy to remember acronyms and possibly even ready to debate that there are more than seven and use something to represent eight or even nine wastes. The real question I would like your input on is if you have ever thought of the other side of the coin? If TIM WOOD is truly the “king of waste” or heads on a coin toss, then what is on the other side? If you are not looking to drive out waste from your process what else are you trying to do? What about adding value to the customer and to your bottom line as a business? Waste, often referred to by the acronym TIM WOOD, is what companies want to minimize from the value stream. The flip side of the coin, E A S I E S T to remember would therefore, be the value that can be maximized by a company. We will walk through a simple side-by-side comparison that can help better illustrate the comparison. We will then expand on TIM WOOD and EASIEST further so companies can identify in process wastes and opportunities to maximize end value to customers – let’s not just leave it to a coin toss!.

Janice Tanner Ernst

Hybrid is here to stay. Is your organization ready for the new realities of a hybrid workplace in your manufacturing organization? Janice Tanner Ernst, Senior HR Consultant with KBRS, will reflect on pre-pandemic manufacturing environments and explore the current state of hybrid workplaces, the challenges and opportunities, and how organizations can help all employees thrive. Participants will explore the impact of hybrid workplaces on collaboration, communication, culture, and employee well-being, with the opportunity to learn from best practices and other participants.

• What does a traditional (conventional) manufacturing environment look like?

• Lessons Learned through the Pandemic

• What can we do?

Nathan Field

Lean methodologies have proven time and time again to offer measurable and impressive results in optimizing business processes. As we continue to build on our successes, however, we inevitably hit a point in which action needs to be taken to allow processes to get to the next level. This can be completed through changing the process through automation, process change, or completely changing things, but what do you choose? As with anything, you must measure it to successfully to know how and what to change. Once you have this data you can adopt things such as digital twinning, automation, AI/ML, etc. But first you must gather the data, and equally as important, you must ensure it is correct. This presentation will focus on how you can gather data from your industrial/business systems. This includes automated systems, web servers, ERPs, and more. It will focus on first identifying the correct terms and definitions, and then offering practical guidance on why and how to add this to your digital journey.

Darrin Mitchell

What future manufacturing leaders are building today is a metaphorical road trip with key pit stops to help any manufacturing business recognize how to: build a global brand, innovate faster than the competition and double your profits.

Andrew Hardman

We will have a one hour discussion on how we can create a Lean Culture by leveraging our most valuable asset . . . people.

• What is a lean Culture?

• How do we create it?

People Oriented

• Leading in a Lean environment

• Engage and Empower

• Team Based Approach

• Creating a Culture of Problem Solving

Process Focussed

• Process, not people

• Results vs. Process

• Traditional vs. Lean

• Plan-Do-Check-Act

• Solving the improvement paradox

Purpose Driven

• Making the link, tying goals to strategy

• The importance of measurement

• Setting Goals – be SMART

Brenda Fay

Many organizations are currently using Agile/Scrum as their basis for successful project and product delivery. This interactive workshop discusses how Agile/Scrum interface with Lean. The purpose of this session is not only to educate participants on Agile and Scrum, but to help participants understand how they can simply relate Lean to Agile and Scrum. With this knowledge, participants will have another tool to increase their project and product delivery.

Jeff Young

Gary Cox

Trish Calder

This is the first part in a two part workshop where we will walk through a real life supply chain challenge and employ lean six sigma tools to learn how to identify and avoid supply chain issues. Participants will have the opportunity to learn how to use extended value stream mapping to identify supply chain pinch points to ensure greater organizational resilience.

Jeff Young

Gary Cox

Trish Calder

This is the second of a two part workshop where we will walk through a real life supply chain challenge and employ lean six sigma tools to learn how to identify and avoid supply chain issues. Participants will have the opportunity to learn how to use a failure modes and effects analysis to determine the risk associated with supply chain pinch points, prioritize and mitigate those risks using empirical methods to ensure greater organizational resilience.

Robert Newcombe

Most lean practitioners are familiar with the application and use of process maps and value stream maps but metrics based process mapping provides the best of both worlds. Metrics based process mapping provides the granularity of traditional process mapping with the data of a value stream map. Combined this provides a powerful tool to analyze your processes for efficiency opportunities. In this session participants will learn what metrics based process map is, when to use it and how to develop one.

Justin Patenaude

At CKF we are faced with two significant interconnected challenges. (1) Low employee engagement scores, employees frustrated with culture of band-aid fixes, and “get it running now” only to deal with the same problems the very next week or next shift. (2) Shortage of skilled trade workers to fix these problems. We created an improvement process that took a wide range of opinion and conflicting priorities off the table and let data tell us where to focus our limited skilled trades to fix problems. We used this process to shift our approach for the betterment of tomorrow and the long term. Through this improvement process we have seen a 6.5% increase in utilization and a 28% decrease in downtime. This presentation will show how we use our data to focus our limited skilled trades on the problems that are negatively impacting our performance. It will show how we sacrifice utilization today, fix it right, for the long-term gain and bring it full circle to improving employee engagement. It will go through several examples of success stories, all using this process.

Mark Corker

MTechHub will have completed the Smart Factory Challenge by March 31, 2023. Ten Canadian SME’s in various manufacturing sector’s identified a production bottleneck that limited revenue growth. We’ll review the journey each company took to combine a digital twin with continuous improvement. We’ll highlight the challenges, solutions results and operational excellence achieved by the Smart Factory Grand Champion. We’ll show even the smallest organization can now afford budget-friendly technology to improve quality, production capacity, lead time and carbon reduction. The Champion was judged on their strategy, capacity for delivery of customer satisfaction, communication and also the extent to which they have created an environment of change, continuous improvement and employee engagement.

Sarah Mitchell

Compressed Air Leak Surveys are a significant first step for industrial customers looking to engage in continuous improvement and achieve efficiencies in production. Leak repairs are inexpensive and fall within maintenance budgets, allowing industrial facilities to reduce operating costs without making capital investments. Industrials can then use these savings to invest in energy audits or efficiency-driven capital upgrades. To quote a research study on this topic, “Optimization of compressed air systems represents one of the largest non-process industrial energy efficiency opportunities, with improvements of 20-50% readily achievable through the introduction of a best-practices approach. Lack of information has been a primary barrier to realizing substantial improvement in the efficiency, reliability, and productivity of industrial compressed air systems.” Optimization of compressed air systems, through leak detection and repair, can yield multiple benefits. Beyond the savings from the leak repairs themselves, there are improvements to overall system pressure, which can further impact equipment relying on compressed air. Total HP in the compressed air system may be reduced as artificial demand from leaks has been addressed. Furthermore, compressed air leak repair is a way to engage employees, from maintenance staff to equipment operators, in energy efficiency and compressed air management.

Troy Lenihan

In this session listeners will learn real successes achieved at Eden Valley Poultry (EVP) as we continue our journey towards building a continuous improvement culture. Culture is defined at EVP as our behaviors, at EVP we belief in our people operating with a continuous improvement mindset each day. By engaging our employees at all levels of the organization and asking good questions to our employees, we identify how we can measure what matters. It starts at the top with our vision & mission and our strategic framework, five-year strategic pillars, corporate and team goals, with KPI’s to control process improvements and sustain results. We will discuss how EVP has identified and applied measurements that matter in our business and how we communicate and engage frontline employees. We will talk about the four key elements of process, and if any one of the preceding four elements are missing, what might the process do? If you can learn to effectively manage and control the process inputs, you are then measuring for predictability with the end goal of exceeding customer expectations. We will discuss the challenges with sustaining improvements, and how we overcome these challenges through teamwork, proper training, and strong leadership. If you achieve a culture of employees all inspired working towards the same goals you will achieve great results, we are better together.

Laura Hopper

Marion MacKenzie

Jenny Ward

The way we work and our expectations of our employers are changing. Work arrangements are evolving, there are fewer physical boundaries in office (and between work and home), collaboration is on the rise, as is diversity. Today there are four generations in the workplace. Younger generations are joining the workforce, and older generations are working longer than previous generations. While work is changing, each generation may have different expectations, needs, and wants (that may flex and change over time). How we relate to and empathize with each other will influence our effectiveness and the engagement we have with our work and our teams. The workforce needs all these cohorts, and needs people to collaborate effectively. This session is designed to increase empathy, understanding, and collaboration between generations. We’ll look at what’s influenced each generation, what that means for expectations in the office, and strategies for increasing connection, collaboration and ultimately effectiveness.

Mike Haley

Digital Twins are a relatively new and exciting approach to improving operational and financial understanding of manufacturing processes. First conceived in 2002, Digital Twins are defined as a “virtual representation of the elements and dynamics of how business processes within an organization operate”. Essentially, Digital Twins are interactive software models that turn often disparate operational and financial data into meaningful results for decision-making.

This presentation will provide an overview of Digital Twins and more specifically what Gartner calls a “Digital Twin of an Organization (DTO)”. It will show how advanced business process modeling and Lean Value Stream Mapping (VSM) can enable any manufacturer or exporter in creating a DTO that provides new insights into key process management areas such as capacity planning, costing, and profitability analysis. It also provides a platform for “future state” scenario-planning be that process improvement and/or new products or customers.

The presentation will also walk through a real-world case study of how a Maritimes company, Crosby’s Molasses, have used DTO modeling to enhance their operations by evaluating production line capacity and utilizations, identifying the true cost of non-value add activities, understanding which products were over and under costed, and developing process improvement business cases for capital investments such as manufacturing systems and robotics.

Blair Oickle

Often businesses have great ideas for implementing new facilities, expanding building footprints, adding new equipment, and bringing in new products. However, during the implementation phase (or once implemented) things don’t always go as planned. 3P helps to ensure what is supposed to happen is what actually happens. Participants will learn about the five step Production Preparation Process (3P) and how it uses cross functional teams, lean principles, and simulation to develop strong implementation plans.

Gary Cox

Gage R&R has so many applications and we will walk you through how this approach was used to analyze Maplewood Farms chicken culling process to identify opportunities to improve yield and maximize profits. This session will also give participants a chance to engage in a fun gage R&R exercise to refresh your memory on how it works.

David Haire

For decades, Lean has been used by manufacturers to reduce operational complexity and improve productivity. It provides a foundation for operational excellence and boosts organizational performance through a focus on value-adding activities. But embracing Lean by itself is not sufficient to address the operational challenges of an increasingly digitally connected and globalized world. Industry 4.0 offers new approaches for dealing with products and new complexities to supply chains. Advanced manufacturing promotes faster, more agile, and more efficient processes using automation technologies for consistent quality and productivity gains. Both Lean and Industry 4.0 promise to solve manufacturing challenges by uncovering the most effective way to reach the next level of operational excellence.

Robert Newcombe

Data is critical to driving decision making but many organizations are not able to readily access it or interpret it quickly or accurately. Visualizing data is critical to daily management practices and this presentation will demonstrate how data can be leveraged effectively to create custom dashboards using Excel. Participants should have basic to intermediate Excel skills to benefit from this presentation.

Wade Kierstead

An honest and somewhat politically insensitive discussion on whether Lean or Continuous Improvement really works in an office / service provider / government environment. We find practitioners are often frustrated trying to implement the principles of Lean Six Sigma or Continuous Improvement in an office environment, because people will gladly let it all fall by the wayside (or possibly push it down the stairs) when we stop focusing on it. Is that not in itself one of the largest wastes of resources, to be implementing improvement systems our customers (staff) don’t want? A change of strategy and focus can lead to some great success stories, and frontline people asking for help. From “If we were starting over…” to just starting your journey and wanting to understand the pitfalls, the presentation will lay out a change of mindset and philosophy that will have staff stopping you in the halls with suggestions and ideas. Where do we focus and how do we inspire our staff to think differently? The presentation will wrap up with the steps to make a real and significant difference in the workplace.

Shawn M.

The presenter will speak of the Canadian Federal Government Cyber-security ecosystem, current threats and risk management.