Professional Development Meeting

March 8th, 2017

5:30 to 9:00 pm

TOPIC: “Supply-Chain and Material Management: 10 Things We’ve Learned From Toyota”

SPEAKER: Richard Rahn & Gerard Leone

Renaissance Boulder Flatiron

Richard Rahn (CPIM) and Gerard Leone are principals with Leonardo Group Americas, a Lean training and consulting company with offices in Boulder and Munich. Richard and Gerard have been full-time Lean consultants since 1994, and have mentored some of the world’s most successful companies, including John Deere, Boeing, and GE. They are currently launching the Lean Design Institute, a platform for online education and certification in Mixed Model Line Design and Mixed Model Material Management. 

Since 2012 Leonardo Group Americas has been teaching workshops on Mixed Model Material Management, hosted at Toyota Material Handling in Columbus, Indiana. They’ve learned a lot just by spending time inside one of North America’s best factories, and in this presentation they will share with you the “Top 10” biggest eye-opening practices and methods that they have seen in use. All of these practices relate to supply-chain and material management, and will be of great interest to the APICS community. You will be surprised! 

Leonardo Group Americas was founded by Richard Rahn and Gerard Leone, Lean practitioners with over 20 years of consulting experience with many of the world's Lean leaders. If you feel like you are conducting endless Kaizen events, there's a good chance it is because your production line was not designed correctly. They've broken the production line design process into two major categories: Mixed Model Line Design and Mixed Model Material Management.