Speaker Bios

Peter Alfvin is a software engineering veteran from Xerox Corporation where he has led the rollout of Lean Software Development. He has been with Xerox since the early days of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and has held a variety of engineering, management and process improvement positions in both research and product development. He has a BS and MS in Computer Science from USC and UCLA, respectively.

Glen Alleman is Vice President, Strategy and Performance management with Lewis & Fowler in Denver, Colorado. Glen's role defines, develops, deploys, and assesses the benefit of Lewis & Fowler's strategy and performance management processes for senior business and technical management clients. These deployments include: Capabilities Based Planning, Performance Measurement Baselines, Balanced Scorecard based enterprise strategies, Project Portfolio Management, Enterprise Project Management, and Program Management Office offerings. Glen's current assignment is assisting clients applying Performance Based Earned Value&tm; to Integrated Master Plan based programs. This includes process improvement of Program Planning and Controls activities to reduce complexity, improve delivered value and institute Lean practices in programmatic controls activities.

Pat Elwer is a Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation. He has been working in the field of Microprocessor Product Development at Intel for 18 years. He has only recently started his Lean journey, but has been working on Process Improvement in his organization for over 2 years. Pat has a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Davis.

Rich Gildersleeve is Senior Vice President of R & D at DJO, Inc., a company specializing in rehabilitation, repair and regeneration products for the orthopedic, spine, and vascular markets. Throughout his career, Rich has been involved in developing new products and product development processes. His team at DJO earned the Product Development and Management Association's (PDMA) 2005 Outstanding Corporate Innovator (OCI) award by demonstrating sustained excellence in the development and profitable commercialization of new products and services.

Rich received a BS in Applied Mechanics at the University of California at San Diego and an MS in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA at San Diego State University. He is a registered professional engineer in the state of California and possesses 16 issued US patents. His book, Winning Business, How to Use Financial Analysis and Benchmarks to Outscore Your Competition, details many business metrics used to improve company performance.

Ron is currently President of Teledyne Benthos. Teledyne Technologies acquired the NASDAQ traded Benthos, Inc. in January 2006. Teledyne Benthos has been engaged in studying and implementing "Learning First Product Development" since 2005.

In June of 2001, Ron joined Benthos, Inc., a publicly traded company, as President, CEO and Director .He was hired to lead the resurgence of this $25 million 40 year old technology company with 140 employees. Benthos designs, manufacturers and sells oceanographic and package inspection equipment. Success at Benthos was achieved by creating a lean culture that improved margins from 28% to 44% and helped grow sales to over $25 million, a 50% increase in three years. Pre-tax profit rose to $2.3 million, from a loss of $3.3 million in 2001.

Ron spent over 20 years at Philips Electronics. He joined the company in 1975 in their Consumer Electronics Division. He began his Philips career in marketing and was promoted to VP of Marketing in 1981. In 1991, he was promoted to Senior VP and General Manager of the $1 billion North American television business that employed over 5,000 people.

In 1995, Ron was promoted to President and CEO of Philips Automotive Electronics; with $200 million in sales and 1,800 employees. Although profitable, this company was inwardly focused and had quality issues with major customers. Ron led the development of a customer-first culture that improved quality ratings by 45% in 18 months and achieved the highest customer quality awards.

In 1998, Philips sold its automotive business to VDO and Ron continued as President and CEO. He was appointed to the Board of VDO Control Systems in Germany. In 1999, he was promoted to President and CEO of all NA VDO operations, with sales of $400 million and 2,700 employees. Ron successfully merged all of the VDO companies into a unified team, provided the strategic leadership and customer focus that increased sales 20% annually.

Ron graduated from the University of Illinois with a BSEE and received a MBA, in finance, from Loyola University of Chicago. He also attended the University of Tennessee Executive Development Program and the Strategic Marketing Management Program of Harvard University.

Sarah graduated from the University of Utah with a B.S. in Psychology in 1996. This was followed by a medical sales position that led to a return to the university to pursue a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering with an emphasis on polymers and composites.

After graduating in 2000, Sarah spent three years at MacLean Quality Composites as an engineer developing products and implementing processing for composite tubing for sporting goods and other industrial applications.

For the past five years, Sarah has worked for Otto Bock Healthcare, a manufacturer of prosthetics. After 2 years as a successful development engineer, she transitioned into a management role with the development engineering group in Salt Lake City. In March of 06, she and her boss attended a lean design conference that planted the seeds of how development could be approached differently. Since then, she and her group have worked successfully, with Katherine Radeka as their guide, to develop the flavor that lean design and development takes within their organization. With only 18 months of application, the successes have made a significant impact on design cycle time and adherence to timelines.

Dantar is Vice President of Continuous Improvement at Sara Lee where he has responsibility for coordinating corporate Continuous Improvement efforts globally and together with his team lead the improvement efforts for the Pricing & Promotions Management process; the Sales & Operations Planning process, and the Innovation process. In February 2005 Sara Lee began a bold and ambitious multi-year plan to transform Sara Lee from a holding company into an integrated operating company focused on its food, beverage, and household and body care business. As a part of this transformation the company began to create a Continuous Improvement Mindset and began establishing common, consistent, global processes with a priority placed on the Sales & Operations Planning, Pricing & Promotions Management, and Innovation processes. Dantar has been leading the improvement of Sara Lee's global Innovation process since 2006 and took on a broader Continuous Improvement leadership role in 2007. His team leads the establishment of these global processes, as well as establishing a Continuous Improvement mindset across the company. In their efforts they work very closely with the business leaders as well as practitioners of the processes to ensure business results are realized.

Prior to joining Sara Lee, Dantar led the Product Development process at Harley-Davidson as Director - Product Development office. Dantar chaired the Product Planning committee as well as the executive product development oversight committee. This development process received the PDMA Corporate Innovator award in 2003. After receiving the PDMA award Dantar led an effort to improve the process using Lean development techniques. Applying Lean techniques resulted in four times the productivity over the previous process that had received the award. Dantar has been awarded 3 US patents and holds a BSME degree from the University of Michigan and a Masters degree in management from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Dantar began his career at General Motors, in advanced engineering for Saginaw Steering Division. His career at General Motors spans a broad range of functions from shop foreman, to Release Engineer for the Corvette steering system, and Staff Engineer supporting the initiation of a Technical center for Delphi in Europe.

Reaz Rasul is the General Manager of the Lean Product Development organization for the GE Healthcare (GEHC) business. In this capacity, he is responsible for leading strategy groups and engineering teams to optimize product development methodologies. Specifically, Reaz is using his first-hand knowledge of lean principles to provide key leadership in architecting these practices across GEHC's $17B portfolio.

Prior to joining GE, Reaz held a number of positions with increasing responsibilities at ExxonMobil, Toyota Motor Corporation and PACCAR. Over the last 10 years, his experiences include operations management, global program management, product development, and corporate strategy.

Reaz holds a BS in Industrial & Systems Engineering from The Ohio State University.

Daniel R. Shoenhair, Director: Engineering Business Manager for PING Inc., began his career at PING 28 years ago. Starting in the marketing area, he later managed this department and spent some time as an independent sales representative for PING is South Florida.

In 1996, Mr. Shoenhair was named PING's Director of Materials leading the Production Planning, Purchasing, Incoming Inspection, Warehouse and Logistics functions of the company. Since 2001, Dan has spent time within Engineering working on PING's new product development processes as well as establishing the company's project management and PLM disciplines.

As an Engineering Director, Dan has been intimately involved in the company's stunning Lean PD improvements: product introductions increased from 3 to 16 per year, time to market drop from 24 to 9 months. Dan has additionally been a thought leader in bringing Toyota's and Michael Kennedy's knowledge capture theories to bear on the company's engineering discoveries.

Recently Mr. Shoenhair has been focused on PING's Lean Enterprise initiatives and has led teams leaning out numerous administrative processes, such as invention disclosures, patents, trademarks, credit/collections, account receivables, commissions, returns, sales reporting and engineering test data.

Bas is originally from Holland, however has lived in China, Finland and is currently again living in China. He worked as a developer in Holland and always felt a mismatch between what he experienced as working and between "what the official literature said you should do". That was solved with the introduction of Extreme Programming and even more so, with Agile Development in general.

In the beginning of 2001, he had enough of the "normal life" and moved to China where he started working for Nokia. Here, he gained experience on very large projects and the traditional ways they are run. After this he became even more convinced that Agile Development is the way forward, for all size projects.

In 2005 he moved to Helsinki, Finland to introduce Agile Development and in particular Scrum, in Nokia Networks. For two years he watched dozens of teams adopt Scrum and other agile practices. Recently, he moved back to one larger project to focus on a smaller scope.

His main interests are in Scrum and especially how to use it within large companies and large projects. He also focuses much on the technical practices, especially test-driven development (including refactoring) and continuous integration because he strongly believes you need a well-factored code base if you want to be fast and flexible. His hobby interests have been lean production and quality management and of course, programming.

He is the author of an upcoming book called Large Agile and Lean Product Development, written together with Craig Larman.