The podcast explores lean manufacturing principles and their practical applications through the expertise of Kelly Mallery, an operational excellence leader with extensive experience at GE Aerospace and Hypertherm. Kelly shares her unique perspective on implementing lean methodologies in both professional and personal contexts.
Kelly dives deep into kata and its role in conflict resolution. She demonstrates how Toyota-inspired principles enhance both workplace and family relationships through vulnerability and open dialogue. She emphasizes that successful lean transformations need to balance process efficiency with human-centered approaches, prioritizing both business goals and employee well-being.
The discussion addresses the evolution of lean practices in the post-COVID environment, including the emergence of virtual Kaizen and the integration of digital tools and AI in lean transformations. Kelly shares practical insights from her experience, particularly focusing on overcoming resistance to change through relationship-building on the shop floor.
Sustainability emerges as a key theme in the episode, as Kelly explains how lean principles can support environmental initiatives without adding unnecessary complexity. She advocates for thoughtful simplification that benefits both business operations and people.
The podcast also tackles the unique challenges and opportunities for women in manufacturing leadership. Kelly offers candid advice about perseverance, authenticity, and breaking barriers in a traditionally male-dominated industry. She shares valuable lessons from both successes and failures, emphasizing the importance of staying true to core lean values under pressure.
In conclusion, the episode provides actionable insights for manufacturing professionals, lean practitioners, and leaders across industries, offering a fresh perspective on leading lean transformations while maintaining a strong focus on the human element of continuous improvement.
Brandin and his team help our customers with setting up the Pathfinder platform and getting up-to-speed on all the features and functionalities, in addition to assisting them with standardizing their processes where needed.
Brandin is a seasoned manufacturing leader, who has spent more than a decade designing and setting up assembly lines in both the US and China, optimizing them, and working with human operators to maximize productivity and quality.
Jesse works closely with our marquis customers to understand their needs, and figures out the best solution that immediately adds dollars to their bottom line.
Jesse has two decades of enterprise sales experience. He has held sales leadership roles at pioneering technology startups.
Andrey takes inventions and converts them into innovations. He leads our product engineering team to turn our scientific prototypes into robust customer-facing products.
Andrey co-founded and successfully exited a startup to immigrate to the US. He spent his next eight years building the core data science infrastructure for Amazon’s supply chain planning team, and the CV/ML infrastructure for Microsoft’s HoloLens organization.
Zeeshan focuses on delighting our customers by understanding their needs and defining product and strategy to meet and exceed these needs. He works closely with our sales leadership to grow our customer base.
Zeeshan was a scientific leader at Microsoft’s HoloLens division, where he invented AI technologies to assist frontline workers across industries. Earlier, he shipped IoT platforms and visual defect detection software for manufacturers at Siemens and MVTec GmbH.
Huy takes our product roadmap and figures out what’s achievable with today’s AI advances, and what we need to invent to solve our customers’ pain points.
Huy led teams of scientists and engineers at NEC and invented technologies for driver assistance systems that are part of 500,000+ Honda cars. He is an inventor on more than 20 US patents, and his research papers are cited by every lab from MIT, Stanford, and CMU to Apple, Google, and Baidu.
