Friday, April 20

8:30 a.m.
A Healthy Culture is the Co-efficient of Innovation
  • Sheila Peyraud
  • Chief Technology Officer (ret.)
  • The Donaldson Company: Minneapolis, MN
The Current Passion for Economic Growth is a Call for Innovation.  New Product Development and Engineering managers, teams and executives in many companies may have lost some ground.  Often caused by project pressures, making impossible schedules, poorly led cultures.    The time to get healthy and 'make it happen’ is now.  Sheila Peyraud presents her practical experiences in transforming a R&D work culture into an Innovation Culture.  She recounts her experiences enabling engineers to solve problems, failures are good for learning.  The human side of technical reviews, acknowledging people and their personal contributions, are just a few essentials of the healthy culture. Sheila will provide from her experiences a wide range of healthy human work culture behaviors.  These behaviors, team, functional management and executive level enable people to innovate and experience work satisfaction.  Healthy Innovation Culture is essential; it drives innovation, economic growth and work satisfaction.  Conference participants can experiment and adapt what works based in Sheila Peyraud’s beliefs, principles and practices.
10:30 a.m.
Ready for Production: Challenges and Basic Execution
  • Ken Kreafle
  • Chief Engineer Production- Avalon 05
  • General Manager- Production Engineering
  • Toyota Engineering/Manufacturing TEMA
Product complexity and product proliferation are current challenges that call for process improvements. These improvements are needed to make schedules and meet costs in a customer driven product development and engineering environment. Ken Kreafle presents his experiences integrating product design with manufacturing at the production launch process stage. Ken’s experience includes Chief Engineer for the 05 Toyota Avalon (product design and product manufacturing). Ken will describe how the basic new product production launch is improved to eliminate recurring problems. He will include the basic tools, culture practices and precepts that every manufacturing company must adapt for lean and agility.
1:00 p.m.
Savvy Practices: The Way to Improve NPD Execution
  • Todd Stute
  • Director of Corporate Process Improvement
  • Western Digital Corporation: San Jose, CA
“Tasks seem less difficult to adapt when you see how others do them” is the Savvy Consortium premise for benchmarking best practices. Todd Stute facilitates the discussion of Savvy Practices presented by the Savvy Conference XXIV Presenters.
3:30 p.m.
Wrap-Up