Leading Manufacturers Gather At Smeal To Share Innovations

UNIVERSITY PARK, PA (September 13, 2007) – Executives from four leading manufacturing operations will gather in November at Penn State to discuss their experiences introducing change in their plant processes.

The 62nd meeting of the Advanced Manufacturing Forum, hosted by the Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change (CMTOC) at Penn State's Smeal College of Business, will be held Nov. 8 and 9 at The Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel on Penn State's University Park campus.

Representatives from Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Medtronics Global Business Solutions, Poli-Film America, Inc., and Topflight Corp. will share insights from their personal experiences managing recent changes and technological innovations in their manufacturing processes.

The forum begins in the evening on Nov. 8 with a dinner reception and continues the next morning and afternoon with the four presenters, each of whom has extensive experience in implementing lean practices that focus on product design, manufacturing, supply chain, and the back office.

The seminars will be followed by morning and afternoon break-out sessions during which attendees can discuss each topic in greater depth.

The presenters and topics:

Jonathan Geiger, Director of Future Airplane Production, Boeing Commercial Airplanes
Geiger will discuss Boeing's recently introduced 787 Dreamliner and how it is raising the bar for global collaboration and for Boeing's next frontier, the lean dream production system. He will share some of the challenges and opportunities that Boeing faces in creating a system that most efficiently transforms customer requirements and raw materials into commercial aerospace products. His discussion will include emerging system performance measures in very large global development and production products.

Renee Cveykus, Senior Finance Manager/Master Black Belt, and Rick Pottratz, Director of Finance, Medtronics Global Business Solutions
Cveykus, a Lean Sigma Black Belt, and Pottratz will discuss how Medtronic's unique blend of Lean and Six Sigma principles are applied to core financial processes and across the company's seven global businesses. They will share their Lean journey through their participation in "waves" of training classes that developed the infrastructure necessary for change. Their talk will also include the implementation of a new information technology system that accelerated the rapid adoption of Lean Sigma, and how manufacturing process improvements were applied to accounts payable transactions.

Geoff Davis, President, and Gary Mooney, Materials Manager, Poli-Film America, Inc.
Davis and Mooney will share how Poli-Film America's new direction and philosophy more than doubled sales volume, tripled manufacturing throughput rates, and consistently increased profitability in the face of a national economic downturn. They'll explain the company's wholly owned regional sales and distribution warehousing linked to a central ERP system, which has the ability to handle a product that is initially built up and subsequently broken down prior to selling to the customer.

Nancy McHenry, Vice President of Supply Chain, Topflight Corp.
McHenry will share Topflight's "Operation Eliminate," the result of an ERP-to-ERP data interchange utilizing real-time client information for production runs, which eliminates the need for inventory, lead times, lot sizes, purchase orders, invoices, and warehousing. She will describe Operation Eliminate's production value and its strategic value in eliminating steps in the supply chain and providing opportunities for total cost reduction.

For more details and registration information, visit www.smeal.psu.edu/cmtoc/forum/forum62.html.

About CMTOC
The Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change strives to help organizations efficiently implement innovations that improve their business practices without greatly disrupting them. As part of that mission, the Advanced Manufacturing Forum exists to provide managers with a setting that encourages them to share experiences and ideas about advanced manufacturing technology and practices.

For more on CMTOC, visit www.smeal.psu.edu/cmtoc.