Thursday, November 6, 2025 Virtual Conference

Peter Palmér, LPPDE and Juha Tammi, Lean Association of Finland - Welcome and Instructions

Peter and Juha represent the two organization who organize these virtual online events and will moderate the Virtual Summit.

Carolyn Carter, Principal Consultant at Carolyn Carter Consulting – Training Interns

At Kimberly-Clark Carolyn worked in the Personal Care R&D organization, and one of her responsibilities was  working with a team coordinating and executing the transformation of  Lean into the R&D organization. There were multiple aspects of this transformation, but one she found particularly rewarding was working with both Interning students and new hires to the Research and Development Team.  They were so hungry to learn and add value and, in many cases, they didn’t always have the structure they needed to maximize their opportunities.  What she found was several of the LPPD processes and tools as part of the LPPD transformation, lent themselves perfectly to meeting the needs of both the interns and the new hires.  This presentation will talk about the needs of both interns and new hires and the process she used to onboard them quickly and enable a steep ramp  up of their learning, while providing a highly effective tool for documentation of their work. Please join Carolyn, as she talks about this critical opportunity in so many organizations today.

Carolyn Carter is Principal Consultant at Carolyn Carter Consulting after an extensive career at the Kimberly-Clark Corporation where she got her experience in Research Product Development with additional focus on Lean and LPPD in Development, and Engineering, Operations and Quality in Manufacturing.

Larry Navarre, Kettering University – Lean Development with AI

The basis of Lean Product and Process Development comes from the studies of Toyota from 1995-2005 by Allen Ward, Durward Sobek, Jim Morgan, Jeff Liker and Mike Kennedy. These have been applied in different extent in western companies focusing on the main principles;

• Focus on creating usable knowledge into trade-off curves • Lead with entrepreneur system designers
• Create teams of responsible experts
• Practice set-based innovation
• Create flow

and methods like knowledge briefs, A3-reports, trade off curves, visual management, chief engineer and much more. But what about agile, digitalization, machine learning and AI? Larry will give us a taste of the future. What was impossible yesterday is already happening...

Larry Navarre is a full-time Lecturer at Kettering University teaching courses in innovation development, supply chain management, project management, and business analytics since 2008. Larry has earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Kent State University (Kent, Ohio) and a Master of Science in Management degree from Purdue University's Krannert Graduate School of Management (West Lafayette, Indiana). Larry has 20 years of management experience in the steel, machinery, and plastics industries. His management responsibilities have spanned from Production Supervisor to Director of Global Product Management and Asian Operations. He has worked internationally with customers, suppliers, and colleagues in 20 countries. Larry is also a managing owner of two family-owned small businesses managing commercial real estate.

Allan Coletta, Principal of Lean 3P Associates and Encouraging Leaders – Using 3P to Grow Your Business by Growing Your Leaders

The Lean 3P (Production, Preparation, Process) methodology can grow business and leaders in powerful and practical ways—especially when applied with the deeper mindset of Product, Process, and People. Allan will explain why and how during his presentation.

Allan Coletta a Principal of Lean 3P Associates, where he helps organizations engage their teams to achieve operational excellence through breakthrough product designs and efficient operations. A seasoned Lean practitioner, he has guided the rapid turnaround of distressed plants and serves as an executive leadership coach, applying Stakeholder Centered Coaching as an associate with Encouraging Leaders LLC. In addition, he assesses applicants for the AME Excellence Award. Previously, Allan was Senior Director of Engineering and Facilities for Siemens Healthineers’ Critical Reagent Manufacturing, building high performance teams, and leveraging the 3P process to design and build new operations. Under his leadership, the site embraced maintenance excellence, tiered management, standardized work, and other Lean solutions, while also introducing Industry 4.0 technologies such as robotics, cobots, vision systems, sensor technologies, and machine learning. Earlier in his career, Allan held technical, supply chain, and operational leadership roles in the chemical process industry, including Site Leader for ICI’s largest specialty chemicals plant in North America, where he implemented extensive Lean systems in a union environment. In 2012, Allan authored The Lean 3P Advantage: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Production Preparation Process, which won a 2013 Shingo Prize. He has served on the Fiduciary Board of the Delaware MEP, is a member of the AME Champions and the AME PCL KRA team, and was formerly on the Delaware Chamber of Commerce Board of Manufacturing Managers. A Chemical Engineer by training, Allan continues to bring people‐centric leadership to manufacturing, driving continuous improvement and achieving lasting business excellence.

Final reflections and remarks

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By Juha Tammi & Peter Palmér

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