How a Strong Culture Fuels Lean Practices

Explore how a company rooted in practical solutions for farmers grew by fostering a strong culture that naturally supports Lean practices. Without any single turning point, we’ve steadily expanded by focusing on core values like excellence, empowerment, innovation, and community. Our leaders create an environment where everyone—especially those on the front lines—is encouraged to share ideas that improve our work. This approach fosters a culture where trying new things is supported, and continuous learning is embraced.

Lessons Learned While Embedding Reconciliation Initiatives

In today's fast-paced and ever-evolving world, managing your business effectively requires an agile and adaptive approach to meet changing needs and competing priorities. Join us to learn how to identify opportunities to think outside the box can enhance your current processes and policies, to ensure a successful change management initiative.

Fostering a Culture of Excellence is a Bumpy Ride

After 20 years of practicing Lean, Argus continues to learn how to develop and support problem solvers to help us navigate towards our True North of Enterprise Excellence. Perhaps our greatest lessons learned are those around fostering a culture to support a sustainable lean journey.

In this presentation, the audience will gain insights to guide strategies and tactics around the importance of developing people to understand lean thinking, not just lean practice. Argus’s lean journey began in 2005 with what now can best be described as an “industrial engineering” approach to lean, otherwise known as a focus on the tools.

What was previously a “factory floor” only focus, has now grown to include everyone touching our value streams, meaning, every team member from rack-hand to CEO. We are seeing business success by developing a customer centric mindset through process ownership supported by lean thinking and practice.

Foundational to this lean reset is understanding and living daily into our shared values: YOU MATTER because you are part of ONE TEAM, we OWN IT because we share a PASSION FOR EXCELLENCE

Rating: Intermediate

How to take lean practices from a distribution company and apply them into manufacturing

How Lean aligns and impacts our company strategy: Improving our operational efficiency and providing more value for our customers has been a part of our strategic map for the past 10 years. We have applied lean tools and integrated them with other objectives in a detailed cause-effect matrix to have even more impact.

Transforming Culture through Leadership, Direction, Empowerment, and Compassion

Join the presenters in sharing their successes and failures of building a winning culture while taking on a new-to-them journey of running and growing a 50 year old manufacturing company. The presentation will cover restoring an established culture through Leadership, Direction, Empowerment, and Compassion, and highlight how Lean philosophy aids in the journey.

Uncover the strategies and tools behind Triple E RV's sustainable leadership development process

The presentation focuses on Triple E RV's journey of shifting the culture towards continuous improvement fundamentals. During the presentation, attendees will gain insights into Triple E RV’s process of developing a sustainable leadership program grounded in accurate data, accountability, and trust. This presentation will provide valuable perspectives on both best practices and challenges. 

Improved product output and improved quality by 25% in 18 months

Magellan Aerospace has a Composite Fabrication Center as part of the F35 Horizontal Tail Assembly Program. Various components for the assembly are made in this area using primarily carbon fiber pre-prep material, laid up, and in two large Autoclaves. The cell is physically separated into a clean room for automated cloth cutting and lay-up, and outside the room, is the Tool Preparation, Debagging and Autoclaves. The processes are complex, require extensive training and certifications to perform and require precise operation of the Autoclaves and automatic cloth cutters.

Creating a culture of incremental improvements.

Rapid-Span, an industry leader since 1983, manufactures steel, precast, and timber components for bridges and transportation infrastructure across North America. Renowned for our expertise, reliability and ability to take on challenging projects, our design-build solutions consistently exceed expectations.

My team had Lean tools everywhere. Yet improvement felt random, unsustainable. It felt, like I was always the one having to push. Frustrating. Sounds familiar?  

In this fast-paced session, I’ll share what I learned as a plant manager joining a site that seemed advanced in Lean yet struggled to improve every day. 

You'll learn how we moved from checkbox Lean to a culture where everyone, every day, every process was an opportunity to get better. No fluff. Just stories from the shopfloor, coaching scars, and a vision turned everything around. If you want to stop managing Lean and start leading it, this is for you.