Curious to learn more about the sessions offered…this is the place!
Join us for an in-depth conversation, guided by experienced TWI masters. This is a great opportunity to explore more advanced topics with your peers. The meet-up is not designed for those new to TWI (only those who have practiced it).
Jim Huntzinger
Oscar Roche
Sometimes we get so engrossed in what we’re doing that we forget why we are actually doing it! Consequently we miss opportunities and/or lose direction.
Oscar will go into why the TWI practice methods are important, what problems within our businesses each aims to help us solve, and a common thread through all.
He will then briefly detail each of the 3 main TWI practice methods which will set you up to learn more throughout the summit.
Tyson Ortiz
What does it take to make TWI-Job Instruction “how we train?” Surprisingly few organizations seem to have nailed this down. Learn failure modes and countermeasures from a deployment that found success after early failures
Rosenthal + Alley
Most of the discussion about JI has focused on implementation of standard work. This is an important precursor to making improvements. However, much less discussion has happened about how to use JI to drive improvement, regardless of the continuous improvement paradigm. Our talk examines the linkage between continuous improvement and respect for people.
The Key Points of a Job Instruction Breakdown are, by definition, memory items that are critical to successfully performing the task or job. They are also, in practice, the things that operators find most difficult to execute or which put the product/service or the worker at risk. In other words, the Job Instruction Breakdown is defining work that we are acknowledging, from the outset, is going to make their lives difficult. This is not respectful.
We can, however, use the Job Instruction Breakdown to guide our improvement efforts. Drawing from the four strategies of JM, we can Eliminate or Combine some of the Important Steps, rethink the work to Eliminate some or all of the Key Points, and Simplify or Rearrange both Key Points and Important Steps. This will make the work easier to perform and make the processes more robust. In effect, we are suggesting using the JIB to drive our improvement efforts, rather than going after each minute detail, as in JM. We think this direction of improvement is profoundly respectful of the people doing the work.
Laura Murray
Betty Gratopp
Zingerman’s Mail Order embrace a good challenge, enjoys uncertainty, and sees the necessity in having to struggle to learn something new. Come hear insight that the ZMO team found helpful and how we’re learning to share this knowledge with others.
Roger Bilas
The TWI J-Programs were created over 70 years ago and are being delivered and applied in the same way as they were then. The circumstances and environment, the technology on how to train and what’s being taught, as well as the people being developed, have changed dramatically. How can we make TWI still useful and relevant?
We will show you the biggest difference between 1944 and now, how it negatively impacts the J-Programs, and what can be done to adjust your application of the tools for success. It’s all about making life for the person easier, which makes the leader’s life easier too!
Interactive sessions (1 room for each of the morning keynote presenters) providing an opportunity to have deeper conversations with keynote presenters and networking with peers.
Attendee led opportunity to share “Ah-ha” moments from each of the 6 discussion rooms.
Skip Steward
The importance of relationships at work.
Patrick Graupp
In 2018 and 2019, Patrick Graupp and his TWI colleagues went to Japan to study Standard Work practice and its relationship to TWI with Isao Kato, the man who led Toyota’s training efforts throughout the Taiichi Ono Era beginning in the early 1950s when TWI was first introduced into Japan and Toyota. This workshop will present and practice the highlights of that training beginning with a review of TWI’s background in TPS (Toyota Production System), as well as Lean, and its connection to Standardized Work. With a combination of lecture and hands-on simulation practice, this presentation will cover: • Core Standard Work Concepts: Takt time, Sequence, WIP and Capacity • Standardization Tools: Work Instruction Sheet, Standard Work Combination Sheet, Standard Work Sheet, Percent Load Chart • The role of standardization in continuous improvement These practices will highlight how the TWI skills of JI+JR+JM support and sustain Standard Work. In this workshop you will learn: • Basic elements of Standardized Work • Supervisor skills needed for Standardized Work • The Supervisor commitment • Standardized work as a people centered system • Connection with TWI programs
Patrick Graupp
Anthony Klotz, an organizational psychologist at Texas A&M who coined the phrase “The Great Resignation” in May of 2021, explains, “It’s not just about getting another job, or leaving the workforce, it’s about taking control of your work and personal life, and making a big decision – resigning – to accomplish that.” He continued, “This is a moment of empowerment for workers, one that will continue into the new year.”
SHRM reported in Oct of 2021 that “55% of U.S. workers say they’ve had direct colleagues voluntarily leave their organization within the last 6 months.” It will take much more than simply raising salaries and improving benefits to hire and retain good workers in this challenging environment. Leadership skills that create immediate and positive experiences with new hires and strengthen bonds of trust with current employees will be critical when workers are considering their many other options. More specifically, according to Klotz, employers will have to learn how to create a more flexible working environment that creates a better work/life balance, including managing remote workers.
In this presentation, we will look at how TWI delivery was reimagined to work, both live and virtually, under COVID restrictions at companies like Teleflex and Gallo Wine (who you will hear from at the Summit) as well as at a large manufacturer of COVID home test kits that radically ramped up production with new machinery and employees arriving at the plant weekly. As it turns out, keeping people motivated and on the job during the pandemic was not so different from keeping Rosie the Riveter at work in the shipyard during WWII when TWI was born during a period of national crisis. Patrick will share what he and his colleagues have learned over the past two years delivering TWI virtually and how the training could be successfully accomplished even when trainers, and many trainees, were participating remotely.
Dr’s Eleanor Glass + Lou Flaspohler
We will discuss the impact of Lean/TWI on an Independent Primary Care Practice. Using Lean/TWI as a foundation we have been able to maintain a practice with a very low overhead, low staffing turnover, outstanding clinical outcomes for our patients and vastly lower elements of burnout. We will discuss specific tools and how they have contributed to our success even in the midst of ever increasing challenges in the healthcare field.
Dave Hyem
At no time have leaders faced so many challenges. First, there was the Covid-19 pandemic, and now it is a post-pandemic world. Shifts in the way we work create new obstacles to navigate. How should leaders respond in times of uncertainty? How can they best support their workforce? Courageous leaders cannot be afraid to challenge themselves as they work with their teams through crises after crises. This workshop addresses how leaders can become aware of themselves, their teams, internal and external stakeholders and find ways to work effectively and compassionately within those tensions
Bob Hesse
Lean tools and methods are like Pokemon – “Gotta Catch ‘em all”. 5S, Andon, Kanban, Just-in-time, Gemba, Kaizen, Poka-Yoke, TWI, Kata, etc. are all GREAT! Often times, however, companies emphasize use of the tools without first understanding and communicating their true PURPOSE. Without clear purpose people fail to see meaning in their work and lose motivation. Our pursuit of excellence becomes a constant culture struggle.
Leadership has a critical role in helping people to clearly understand their purpose and ensuring that they are enabling the greatest opportunities for realizing this purpose. Through structured practices of leading, training, improving, leaders can reinforce purpose while developing and empowering people – powerful motivators.
In this session, Bob Hesse will share his experiences with the highs and lows of the Pursuit of Excellence. He will provide examples of how aligning people and processes with purpose can instill an improvement culture and how the TWI principles enable this culture.
Bob Jones Jr. + Kelly Still
The Chef’s Garden is a family farming operation that has supplied specialty vegetables, edible flowers and micro greens to four and five-star chefs across all fifty states in the US and countries around the world for over 30 years. During COVID-19 confinement, restaurant demand disappeared. Our business model pivoted to home delivery and a large volume USDA Farm to Families Food Box Program. Chefs’ orders are larger, fewer, with custom contents in each. Home delivery boxes are smaller in size, much greater in number and each having the option of many custom add-ons. USDA Farm to Families Food Box are all uniform product recipe boxes and a large number of box outputs.
When what is demanded changes dramatically, how we execute the new work content must adapt. We had to refocus all efforts to execute on the values of our new customers. This paradigm shift caused us to refit our entire process quite literally on the fly. Using Job Breakdown, in a day we designed a USDA Box flow concept using a piece of cardboard, a marker and a box cutter! On what we now know is called “JI” we reduced the time to perform USDA orders by over 80%. We re-purposed the time to grow the capacity of home delivery we are now able to perform.
The results were astounding! As restaurants rebound, we now meet both streams of demand. With our high product quality standards, USDA recipients and home delivery customers now enjoy world-class produce that five-star chefs knew all along. As we continue to adapt our efforts, we have created ways to add further business. Standard working isn’t mindless conformity, it’s intentional mindfulness. We didn’t just save an existing business, we are creating new ones
Abdul Alzindani
In lean, we focus on designing processes with “built-in-quality” as the ultimate goal. We then step away from those processes only to be surprised that those processes are not achieving the quality standards we expected. When we look deeper as to why the actual results are not meeting the targets, we realize that one of the major drivers of that gap is poor understanding of standardized work if it exists at all. We see that over time, people change, and new standards are introduced, but without good management of those changes, whatever standardized work existed becomes outdated and less useful for the people executing the work. Eventually, people start relying on tribal knowledge, with it, bad habits and poor work practices creep in, hence, resulting in poor quality.
Following the 4 TWI steps have been very effective in exposing the quality system weaknesses and allowing us to improve the quality of our processes. By implementing those 4 steps, we are ensuring people are set up for success from day one to produce good quality output every time
Laura Murray
Celeste Ayers + Wes Rawlings
As if 2020-21 were not challenging enough with a global pandemic the demand for wine and spirits grew exponential putting a strain on the talent pipeline for the Winery. In addition to hiring, onboarding and training over 200+ new employees in 6-month span there were needs to stand up a handful of new production lines and transition existing production lines from a 5-day work week to 24-hour production.
Executive leadership had a clear call to action for the training organization – shorten the cycle time for training new and incumbent employees on equipment while improving the quality of the training. The answer was clear – TWI Job Instruction. This session will cover the case study of how our TWI Job Instruction journey began and fundamentally changed our competitive advantage as an organization.
Raaghavan Ventrakam
During this case study presentation, Raaghavan Venkatram – Continuous Improvement Engineer and Luis Torres – Frontline leader from Norton McMurray Manufacturing Company will share their experiences and insights on how the application of Work Standards: Defining Normal of the Standardization Step Ups Reference Model by the TWI Institute has positively impacted other ‘J’ programs namely Job Instruction(JI), Job Relations (JR), Job Methods (JM) and problem solving in general within their company
Paul Everitt, Operations Director at INX International UK
Oscar Roche
OPTIONAL | FULL-DAY WORKSHOPS
Sam Wagner
Patrick Graupp
Patrick began his training career at the SANYO Electric Corporate Training Center in Japan after graduating with Highest Honors from Drexel University in 1980. There he learned to deliver TWI from his mentor Kazuhiko Shibuya. Mr. Shibuya was trained by Kenji Ogawa who was trained by the four TWI Inc. trainers sent from the US to help Japan rebuild industry in 1951. Patrick earned an MBA from Boston University while heading Sanyo’s global training effort. He was later promoted to the head of Human Resources for SANYO North America Corp. in San Diego, CA where he settled.
Patrick partnered with Bob Wrona in 2001 to conduct TWI pilot projects in Syracuse, NY that became the foundation for the TWI Institute which has since trained a rapidly expanding global network of thousands of certified trainers who are now delivering TWI training in the manufacturing, health care, construction, energy, and service industries in the US and around the globe. These efforts were outlined in their book The TWI Workbook: Essential Skills for Supervisors, a Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize Recipient for 2007 now in its Second Edition. Patrick is also the author of Implementing TWI: Creating and Managing a Skills-Based Culture published in 2010, Getting to Standard Work in Health Care: Using TWI to Create a Foundation for Quality Care published in 2012 and now in its Second Edition, and Building a Global Learning Organization: Using TWI to Succeed with Strategic Workforce Expansion in the LEGO Group a Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize Recipient for 2015. His latest work is Creating an Effective Management System: Integrating Policy Deployment, TWI, and Kata published in 2020.
