SR Managers: As the day starts early for these folks, 7:30 is the best time to start this event so they can get back to their buildings and still engage the day-to-day demands of their businesses. Eric Gowling of Rutherford Controls provided an overview of their business model followed by a tour. The focus of the discussion and benchmarking was the Strategic Plan. For the business leaders present, this discussion topic lead into a multitude of opportunities to share and be mindful of going forward in leading your business to it's next level of growth. Some of the discussion points included:

• Strategy Execution: Visual tracking of milestones and communication
• Remaining flexible to external assumptions and conditions in your plan with Re-assessment and review built in to milestones
• Prioritization of engineering tasks to fuel new product development and lead time to market; "Focus and Finish" in project management
• Aligning priorities between depts. that follow the Strategic Plan
• Balancing "Protective Capacity"

As a Sr Manager in your business, where do you stand with the above in balancing the "day-to-day" with also laying seeds for your strategic plan?

Continuous Improvement:  30 manufacturing professionals attended this session! The mix of manufacturers across all industries is the key to facilitating learning in this format. This session was so interesting I will be following up with a separate blog to profile the learning in more detail....In a nutshell, Rutherford Controls is not your typical manufacturing environment as 85% of the products are outsourced with the other 15% light assembly on site. One of the key elements of the CI function is vendor management. The problem for the CI group was based on: "How do you manage cost and risk with multiple suppliers". Since this was not a typical "reach out and touch" CI problem, members were forced to "get out of their box" and critically re-think CI in the context of this problem and their own business model. They key for those visiting were to simplify the problem by asking themselves: "What do they do in their respective plants to deal with quality with their suppliers and manage the consequences in their CI role? How does this affect them? How does this drill down through the various internal stakeholders and customers in your administrative value stream? This proved to be a very valuable exercise as people really had to put on their thinking caps and reflect, and Rutherford benefitted from fresh perspectives of their paradigm.

The break-out groups brainstormed a multitude of opportunities for Rutherford to consider as they re-think their vendor management strategy and how it links to new product development as well as existing suppliers.

I will be following up in a later blog on this session .  Meanwhile, what are some key elements of your vendor management strategy, especially when outsourcing overseas with long lead times? How "plugged in" are your various depts. at critical milestones?

Health & Safety:  Susan McEwen, Employer Specialist from the MOL provided a detailed presentation on the new WSIB business model and some best practices for H&S professionals to best cope with it, along with some updates from the MOL. Members were also able to ask questions and benchmark with each other their strategies and case examples. For a copy of this presentation, please go to the EMC website: www.emccanada.org and log into the member area and go the K-W/Cambridge consortium page, or contact Mike Baker: mbaker@emccanada.org

Human Resources:  The topic for this month was Cross-training Strategies. As many companies are attempting to remain flexible to customer demand, the cross-training of employees between job functions is becoming an important part of running your business. For discussion the group addressed:

• Do you have constraints with your ability to cross-train? What are they and how are you dealing them?
• How have you rolled out your cross-training process and integrated it into your HR procedures? How do you track and monitor it?
• What has made your cross-training efforts successful?
• If you were to improve what you have in place regarding cross-training, what would you do?

The group split up into two brainstorming groups to share best practices and strategies to address these questions. As an HR professional, how are you addressing these in your business? For further details of this discussion, please contact Mike Baker at EMC.

Congratulations to all Waterloo Region manufacturing professionals that attended this month. Our next sessions are Sept 9, 2009 hosted by PWO Canada Ltd in Kitchener. Stay tuned for upcoming agendas.

Yours in Networking,

Mike Baker, EMC