Speakers at the UK Lean Summit 2007

Below you will find biographies for the speakers of the Lean Summit 2007 in order of appearance.

Daniel Jones – Chairman, Lean Enterprise Academy Limited

Daniel Jones is a management thought leader and advisor on applying lean, process thinking pioneered by Toyota to every type of business across the world. He is the founding Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy www.leanuk.org in the UK, dedicated to pushing forward the frontiers of lean thinking and helping others with its implementation. His work has inspired the very successful implementation of lean by Tesco and many other companies.

He is the author with James P Womack of the influential, best-selling management books – The Machine that Changed the World, and Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Organisation – which describe the principles and practice of lean thinking in production. Their latest book Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers can Create Value and Wealth Together extends these ideas to consumption, provision and service delivery.

These books have triggered a worldwide movement of lean practitioners and the establishment of the Lean Global Network of Lean Institutes (including the Lean Enterprise Academy) which teach lean locally and have organised over 25 Lean Summits in the USA, UK, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, France, Holland, Denmark, Poland, Turkey, Israel, South Africa, India, China and Australia.

David Ben-Tovim – Director Redesigning Care, Flinders Medical Centre

Professor David Ben-Tovim is a psychiatrist and clinical epidemiologist by background. He is currently leading the Redesigning Care program at the Flinders Medical Centre, a 500 bed teaching hospital in the southern suburbs of Adelaide in South Australia. The Redesigning Care program is a hospital wide program applying Lean Thinking to processes throughout the institution from the Emergency Department through to the Central Sterile Supply Department. Hundreds of the hospital staff have now participated in a Lean Thinking training program or a Redesign project. The Redesigning Care group at Flinders also mounted the First Australasian Redesigning Care summit in Adelaide in March 2005. Over three hundred and fifty participants from hospitals and health services throughout Australasia attended the summit whose title was “Improving Patient flow by applying Lean thinking principles”.

David Ben-Tovim trained in Medicine and Psychiatry at the Middlesex and St Georges University Hospitals in London, and in Epidemiology at the Institute of Psychiatry, also in London. He moved to Australia in 1984, after a period of work in Botswana. He has acted as a consultant for the World Health Organisation on a number of occasions, as well as making various attempts to reform health services in South Australia and elsewhere. He established the Clinical Epidemiology Unit at the Flinders Medical Centre in 1998, and was Director of Clinical Governance for the hospital prior to the launch of the Redesigning Care program in 2003. He is the author of over seventy publications in the peer reviewed literature. One of his abiding regrets is that his monograph on mental health and primary health care in Botswana was published well before the country was discovered by the readers of Alexander Mccall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, and is now out of print.

David Fillingham – Chief Executive, Royal Bolton Hospitals NHS Trust

David Fillingham has been Chief Executive at Bolton Hospitals NHS Trust since September 2004. He joined the NHS in 1989 having previously worked in Personnel Management and Marketing positions with Pilkington Plc. After a short period at Mersey Regional Health Authority, David has occupied a number of Chief Executive positions – in Primary Care at Wirral FHSA from 1991 until 1993; in commissioning at St Helens & Knowsley HA from 1993 until 1997 and in acute hospital services at North Staffordshire Hospitals Trust from 1997 to 2001.

From 2001 to 2004 David was Director of the NHS Modernisation Agency responsible for developing new ways of working and promoting leadership development across the NHS as a whole. David is now relishing the challenge of putting that national experience in to practice back on the frontline of the NHS at Bolton. In particular he is deeply involved in applying “lean” principles to healthcare.

David lives in St Helens in Lancashire. Other than the NHS his passions are watching his local rugby league team and spending time with his wife and two daughters.

John Neill – Chief Executive, Unipart Group

In 1987, John Neill led the management buyout of Unipart Group and began the process of transforming the culture and philosophy of the business. As a result of the senior team’s commitment to a stakeholder philosophy, the majority of the company today is owned by management and employees.

In the late ‘80s, the company set out to achieve world class operational performance through the implementation of Lean. Today, Unipart successfully supplies a wide range of blue chip companies including Jaguar, Airbus, Vodafone, Homebase and Halfords. Cranfield Institute has voted Unipart Group the ‘Most Visionary Company for Transformational Change’ in the UK; while John is personally recognised as a leading authority on the practical application of Lean principles in the service sector.

Neil McEvoy – Chief Executive, Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital, Canada

Neil McEvoy is President and CEO of Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital a 300 bed tertiary care facility in the border city of Windsor, in southwestern Ontario, Canada.

An engineer by training, Neil began his career designing clinical laboratory equipment, and entered the hospital field by establishing a Clinical Engineering Department at one of Canada’s teaching hospitals.

For eighteen years he served as chief operating officer, working with QA, TQM, UM, QI and one or two other acronyms that healthcare has embraced. Throughout, he developed a keen interest in the leadership of change not only as process, but as system and as learning as well.

Since taking up his role in 2004 as CEO of Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital, Neil has set out to foster a cultural change among the 2,000 staff and physicians at the hospital. As part of this renewal he introduced LEAN to the hospital team in 2005. By spring of 2006, the Emergency Department had seen tremendous improvements in patient access and service, and by year end major initiatives were underway in five other areas.

The management team is now engaged in a major hospital-wide integration exercise that extends the experience and learnings gained in the LEAN projects.

Neil was born in Dublin, Ireland, and was educated at University College, Dublin, The Ohio State University, and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Graham Booth – ex Supply Chain Director, Tesco Stores, UK

Currently an active member of ECR Europe co-chairing the Shared Learning board and acting advisor to conference, and operational boards. Non Executive of Polymer Logistics (UK) Ltd a Retail Ready Packaging Company.

With a huge range of contacts throughout the world in both retailing and manufacturing working through his own company J.A.N.G International, allows for constant appraisal of the Industry.

Previously Stores Board Director of Tesco plc having been in its management team for 35 years.

Was the architect of much of the Tesco current replenishment systems for total supply chain management with special emphasis on automated ordering value chain analysis shelf ready packaging and lean thinking. Served time in stores from store manager to regional director before moving into a central role to drive what is classed as a world leading supply chain.

John Shook – CEO, Lean Enterprise Institute

John Shook is recognized as a true sensei who enthusiastically shares his knowledge and insights within the Lean Community and with those who have not yet made the lean leap.

Shook learned about lean management while working for Toyota for nearly 11 years in Japan and the U.S., helping it transfer production, engineering, and management systems from Japan to NUMMI and subsequently to other operations around the world. While at Toyota’s headquarters, he became the company’s first American kacho (manager) in Japan. In the U.S., Shook joined Toyota’s North American engineering, research and development center in Ann Arbor, MI, as general manager of administration and planning. His last position with Toyota was as senior American manager with the Toyota Supplier Support Center in Lexington, KY, assisting North American companies implement the Toyota Production System. As co-author of Learning to See John helped introduce the world to value-stream mapping. John also co-authored Kaizen Express, a bi-lingual manual of the essential concepts and tools of the Toyota Production System. In his latest book Managing to Learn, he describes the A3 management process at the heart of lean management and leadership.

Shook is an industrial anthropologist with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee, a master’s degree from the University of Hawaii, and is a graduate of the Japan-America Institute of Management Science. He is the former director of the University of Michigan, Japan Technological Management Program, and faculty of the university’s Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering.

He is the author of “Toyota’s Secret: The A3 Report”; Sloan Management Review, July 2010; “How to Change a Culture: Lessons from NUMMI”; Sloan Management Review, January 2010. Shook is a sought-after conference keynoter who has been interviewed on lean management by National Public Radio, Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous trade publications.

Ian Glenday – Senior Fellow, Lean Enterprise Academy Limited

Ian started his lean journey as a micro-biologist running a fermentation plant producing enzymes, where he first began developing lean concepts and principles for application in process industries. After time out to gain an MBA from Bradford Business School he joined Reckitt & Colman. He led an MRPII project to class “A” status in their pharmaceutical division. He then moved to the house-hold and toiletries division where he was responsible for initiating and implementing a pan-European supply chain strategy based on the lean concept of “every product every interval”. He then became Head of Policy Deployment at Colman’s of Norwich where substantial increases in sales per employee, market share and profit margins were achieved by applying Lean Thinking across the whole company.

More recently Ian has been working with companies as an independent Lean coach and sensei. His approach to applying lean in many types of industries, including chemicals, paints, pharmaceuticals, grocery, food and drinks, is refreshingly different, instructive and entertaining.

Ian currently divides his time between working with Professor Daniel Jones at the Lean Enterprise Academy where he is a Senior Fellow, delivering workshops for Lean Enterprise Institutes around the world as well as helping businesses to make their own Lean transformations through his company Repetitive Flexible Supply Ltd. (www.rfsweb.com).

Dave Brunt – Chief Executive, Lean Enterprise Academy Limited

David Brunt is Chief Executive at the Lean Enterprise Academy. The academy is dedicated to pushing forward the frontiers of lean thinking and helping others with its implementation. He is the co-author of “Creating Lean Dealers – The lean route to satisfied customers, productive employees and profitable retailers.”

David helps firms making a lean transformation. He conducts public workshops at the Lean Enterprise Academy and develops and delivers bespoke in-house workshops for firms. In addition David mentors firms making a lean transformation. He has walked and mapped over 300 value streams in both manufacturing and service sectors in businesses such as steel production, vehicle and component assembly, FMCG, retailing and banking and financial services.

David has been both applying and researching lean since 1990. He spent over three and a half years as the Porsche Verbessrungs Process (PVP – Porsche Improvement Process) Manager at Porsche Cars Great Britain and carried out work to develop lean in after sales, used car processing and parts operations as well as conducting a number of other business process improvement projects at dealer and national sales company level. His work on lean dealer operations formed the basis for several chapters in James P. Womack and Daniel Jones’ book, Lean Solutions, and his work has been implemented successfully by GFS, the “lean dealer” example in the book.

Prior to his work at Porsche, David was Senior Research Associate working for Daniel Jones at the Lean Enterprise Research Centre at Cardiff University Business School. There he was involved in a number of research projects:

  • The Lean Processing Programme (LEAP), a three-year initiative focused on mapping steel to component value streams to identify significant gains in competitive advantage for the UK upstream automotive industry.
  • Lean projects with individual firms to research and apply Lean Thinking outside the automotive industry in areas such as FMCG and non-automotive based manufacturing.
  • The International Car Distribution Programme (ICDP), the world’s leading co-operative research programme into the future of car distribution and retailing. Research focussed on the application of Lean Thinking to car distribution and car dealerships.

David has written a number of reports and publications including “Supply Chain Management And The British Metals Industry” for The Metals Industry Competitive Enterprise (MICE) and the books “Manufacturing Operations and Supply Chain Management – The Lean Approach” with David Taylor (2001) and “Creating Lean Dealers – the lean route to satisfied customers, productive employees and profitable retailers” with John Kiff (2007.)

David’s career started in the automotive industry at Rolls-Royce Motor Cars where he held a number of roles in the fields of Purchasing, Supplier Development, Quality and Customer Service.

He holds a Masters in Business Administration specialising in Supply Chain Management from Cardiff Business School.

Jim Womack – Founder and Senior Advisor, Lean Enterprise Institute

Management expert James P. Womack, Ph.D., is the founder and senior advisor to the Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc., a nonprofit training, publishing, conference, and management research company chartered in August 1997 to advance a set of ideas known as lean production and lean thinking, based initially on Toyota’s business system and now being extended to an entire lean management system.

The intellectual basis for the Cambridge, MA-based Institute is described in a series of books and articles co-authored by Womack and Daniel Jones over the past 20 years. The most widely known books are: The Machine That Changed the World(Macmillan/Rawson Associates, 1990), Lean Thinking (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Lean Solutions (Simon & Schuster, 2005), andSeeing The Whole Value Stream (Lean Enterprise Institute, 2011). Articles include: “From Lean Production to the Lean Enterprise” (Harvard Business Review, March-April, 1994), “Beyond Toyota: How to Root Out Waste and Pursue Perfection” (Harvard Business Review, September-October, 1996), “Lean Consumption” (Harvard Business Review, March-April, 2005).

Womack received a B.A. in political science from the University of Chicago in 1970, a master’s degree in transportation systems from Harvard in 1975, and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT in 1982 (for a dissertation on comparative industrial policy in the U.S., Germany, and Japan). During the period 1975-1991, he was a full-time research scientist at MIT directing a series of comparative studies of world manufacturing practices. As research director of MIT’s International Motor Vehicle Program, Womack led the research team that coined the term “lean production” to describe Toyota’s business system.

Womack served as the Institute’s chairman and CEO from 1997 until 2010 when he was succeeded by John Shook.

Peter Willats – Senior Advisor, McKinsey & Company Inc.

Peter has spent most of his working life developing and implementing lean systems. As a member of the Borad of GKN Automotive in the 1980’s, he was exposed to lean ( before the term was coined ) as a supplier to all of the japanese OEMs and while serving in the Management Board of two of the company’s joint ventures in Japan. In 1990 he started the Kaizen Institute of Europe with Masaaki Imai with the aim of bringing best practice Japanese shopfloor management to Europe. During the course of the following five years, he served four pasenger car makers in Europe as well as a range of other industries, adapting the methods and approach to different cultural and technical environments.

In the mid 90s, he was appointed as the Director of the Manfacturing Practice at McKinsey & Co and spent the next decade establishing operations in North America, across Europe and finally in China. During this time he extended the application of lean systems design to process industries and the service sector. In 1998, he founded the Production Systems Design Center in the UK to provide a two year lean training course to the Firm’s consulants and clients. The Center now operates in seven locations around the world.

Peter is currently a Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Co and an advisor to Cancer Partners UK.

Kate Silvester – Osprey Coach, Heart of England NHS Trust, UK

Kate Silvester originally trained and practised as an ophthalmologist. In 1991 she retrained as a manufacturing systems engineer. Kate spent seven years in management consultancy transferring manufacturing principles to service industries such as banking, airlines and healthcare.

In 1999 she rejoined the UK’s National Health Service and worked on many national programmes to improve the flow of patients through the system, thus improving timeliness, cost and quality of healthcare. Kate’s specific area of expertise is in the design and management of organisational systems to address the variability in demand and capacity. She was appointed as a honorary senior lecturer at Warwick Medical School in January 06.

She now coaches NHS boards and senior clinicians in systems engineering techniques (including Lean) as part of the Osprey programme.

Paul Walley – Associate Professor, Warwick Business School, UK

Paul Walley is Associate Professor in Operations Management at Warwick Business School. He has worked with healthcare organisations for the last 12 years. He has been an advisor to NHS Improvement Collaborative programmes, including the Emergency Services Collaborative and the Improvement Partnership. In 2005/6 he directed a study into the potential for Lean Thinking in the Scottish Public Sector, which recommended that Lean could be used to make dramatic improvements to quality and efficiency. At the University, he works as part of a multi-disciplinary team the is developing the concept of “Clinical Systems Improvement” as a means of engaging clinicians in Lean.

Bill Owad – Senior Vice President Operational Excellence, Cardinal Health, USA

William P. Owad, Jr., senior vice president of Operational Excellence with Cardinal Health’s Medical Products Manufacturing segment, is responsible for the development and implementation of an enterprise approach to operational excellence. Owad also supports the development and implementation of quality and customer loyalty measurement systems.

Owad, who has served as a examiner for both The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Program and the Ohio Award for Excellence, is a trained Six Sigma Black Belt. He also is a graduate of Intermountain Healthcare’s Advanced Training Program in Health Care Delivery.

Prior to joining Cardinal Health, Owad, the author of several publications and presentations on quality improvement and customer loyalty research, held many operations and administrative roles within the health care provider market. These roles include corporate director of Quality for ProMedica Health System, executive director for Cordelia Martin Health Center, and several adjunct faculty positions with the College of Pharmacy at the University of Toledo and other nationally recognized programs.

Owad is currently serving as the Past Chair to the Central Ohio American Red Cross BioMedical Services Board and is a past Board member for Management Excellence Incorporated.

Owad received his bachelor’s of science degree in pharmaceutical sciences and his master’s of business administration from the University of Toledo.

Robin Santucci – Business Manager / Senior Consultant, Global Solutions Consulting

Robin heads up the Global Solutions Consulting Practice for Siemens Canada Ltd. Using a LEAN approach, Global Solutions consultants provide clinical consulting expertise in patient centric workflow optimization enabled by technology. Global Solutions is a “vendor neutral” arm of Siemens world wide providing consultative services in the areas of Patient Centric Workflow Optimization, Process Based Facility Design, Demand Driven Asset Optimization, and Technology Enabled Innovation. Each engagement is aimed at eliminating waste and creating value chains to enhance the patient journey and clinical outcomes.

Prior to joining Siemens, Robin held a number of hospital leadership positions within Canada. Her background includes holding senior leadership positions in community as well as multi-site academic sciences centers including McMaster University Medical Centre. Robin has been a presenter at numerous conferences in Canada and the United States holding a MBA as well as a bachelor of science in nursing and nurse practitioner certification.

Vic Chance – Vice President World Wide Operations, Cordis, a Johnson & Johnson Company, USA

Victor Chance is Worldwide Vice President of Operations for Cordis Corporation, a $4B sales unit of the Johnson & Johnson company,. Responsible for Worldwide Operations, Mr. Chance directs the company’s global manufacturing, supply chain management and strategic sourcing activities. Vic is well known within J&J as an accomplished implementer of lean production systems and six sigma programs with a strong track record of generating year over year productivity increases.

Prior to joining Cordis, Mr. Chance was Vice President of Operations, Worldwide for Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics where he deployed an operational re-engineering program using J&J’s Process Excellence tools. The changes resulted in significant improvements in productivity, quality, response time and customer satisfaction.

Vic joined Johnson & Johnson in 1999 after 12 years at the AlliedSignal Corporation, being a key contributor to that company’s operational excellence transformation. Mr. Chance was heavily involved in the deployment of 6 Sigma and Lean Manufacturing at AlliedSignal during the course of multiple operations management assignments in several businesses.

A graduate of Auburn University with a B.S. in Engineering, Mr. Chance also holds an M.S. in Manufacturing Engineering from the University of Bridgeport.

Richard Steyn – Consultant Thoracic Surgeon, Heart of England NHS Turst, UK

Awaiting Bio

John Toussaint – CEO emeritus, ThedaCare

CEO of the newly-launched ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value

The Center’s mission is to create a healthcare marketplace that rewards providers for delivering value measured in terms of best quality at the lowest

Scott Webster – Senior Vice President, Supply Chain Services, Medtronic, USA

Scot Webster graduated from Bucknell University with a BS in Chemical Engineering. Scot held various engineering and shop management positions eventually teaching and leading Lean and Six Sigma at General Electric Medical Systems. Scot is one of GE’s first Certified Master Black Belts and was the Director of Quality for Asia and General Manager of Compliance and Regulatory Affairs.

Beginning 2003 Scot accepted the Vice President of Quality role at Medtronic, Inc., responsible for designing and deploying their Lean and Six Sigma methodology. Presently, residing in Minneapolis, Scot is the VP of Global Business Solutions for Medtronic, Inc.

Michael Ballé – Co-Founder , Institut Lean France (www.lean.enst.fr)

Author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager

Dr. Michael Ballé is a best-selling author and executive lean coach. He assists CEOs in leading the lean transformation of their businesses and has fifteen years experience in lean research and practice. He is also associate researcher at Telecom Paristech where he is co-founder of the Projet Lean Entreprise, as well as co-founder of the French Lean Institute. He has co-authored two lean novels: The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager, for which he has been awarded the Shingo Prize in 2006 and 2011. He has a background in both Systems Thinking (he is the author of Managing With Systems Thinking, McGraw Hill) and cognitive sociology, having received a Ph.D. from La Sorbonne in Social Sciences and Knowledge Sciences. He writes the weekly Gemba Coach column for the Lean Enterprise Institute: http://www.lean.org/balle/

For more information about Michael Ballé please see www.michaelballe.fr.

Denise Bennett – Deputy Director, Redisigning Care, Flinders Medical Centre, Australia

Denise Bennett is currently Deputy Director of the Redesigning Care program at Flinders Medical Centre. She has been a member of the team since the commencement of the program in late 2003. Denise has supported major redesign within the medical patient journey and several other hospital wide programs of work including nursing, after hours, and separation summary redesign.

Denise has a background in nursing, management, project management and research. Her career in nursing was predominantly in nephrology within both the public and private sector. Denise’s passion for leading and managing change has been vitalised by her exposure to Lean Thinking. Denise has played a major role in the organisation of the 3 Australasian Redesigning Health Care Summits held to date. She also plays an active role in the newly founded Australasian Lean Health Network.

Carol Makin – Consultant Colorectal Surgeon, Wirral Hospital NHS Trust

Carol has been a Consultant Colorectal Surgeon for 17 years at Wirral Hospital NHS Trust. She is currently Clinical Director for General Surgery & Urology and formerly Clinical Director on the Trust Board

Carol is particularly concerned with obtaining a good quality outcome for all patients produced in association with staff who are valued members of a team – you should want to go to work!

Over the years Carol has embraced the concept of service redesign. Initial exposure was through the application of action learning in a multidisciplinary group – turning around house officer recruitment from 10 applicants for 40 posts to over subscription within 1 year. Subsequent experience with phase 1 of the Cancer Services Collaborative and the Modernisation Agency demonstrated the potential for effective working between clinicians and management focused on a specific project over a defined time period.

Carol is tired with the annual round of cost improvement exercises resulting in staff reductions (often experienced and therefore expensive members of staff ) in combination with pressure on clinicians to do more. There is a time when working harder, longer, and smarter ceases to be effective and there are many disillusioned workers in the NHS today.

The Lean approach is not a quick fix with instant gains in the traditional sense of NHS measurements. Adopting Lean is a whole new philosophy. An organisational culture change is necessary. Lean brings an opportunity to redesign and modernise in an environment where everyone’s opinion is valued, but perhaps most important of all the opportunity to change rapidly and embed changes into routine practice with resulting longer term rewards than the NHS has seen in the past.

Having been inspired by Lean Thinking, the Lean Summit, and Professor Daniel Jones, Carol has obtained CEO and senior management support to apply Lean principles to healthcare at Wirral. In May 2006 the first rapid improvement workshop was held around elective surgical services. This was followed in October 2006 by joint workshop between A&E and PCT.

Ann Eason – National Manager Pathology Service Improvement, NHS

Ann Eason, leads the National Pathology Service Improvement Programme providing lean and six sigma services for NHS pathology teams. Her career began in pathology and having trained in each of the four main disciplines became state registered in microbiology. She has since worked with medical, surgical, geriatric care and emergency teams in a number of roles. Work with the NHS Coronary Heart Disease Collaborative provided a valuable opportunity to work across the healthcare spectrum of primary, secondary and tertiary care settings.

Ann has an MSc and MBA and an interest in evidence based medicine and the psychology of change management. She has written and contributed to a number of publications.

Michael Szwarcbord – Chief Executive, Flinders Medical Centre, Australia

Michael Szwarcbord took up his position as Executive Director, Acute Services, Southern Adelaide Health Service and the General Manager, Flinders Medical Centre in May 2005. He is responsible for hospital service in the southern Adelaide region.

Mr Szwarcbord has held both roles of Chief Executive Officer and Deputy Chief Executive Flinders Medical Centre. In 2004 he introduced and has subsequently sponsored the ‘Redesigning Care’ initiative to successfully transform hospital processes based on ‘Lean Thinking’.

Prior to commencing at Flinders Medical Centre in early 2002 he held the appointment of Chief Executive, ACT Community Care. His career has predominantly been that of a senior executive in human services in the public sector in South Australia, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. This has spanned health services, disability services, statutory welfare policy, planning and service delivery; and the purchasing and funding of non government services.

Mr Szwarcbord qualifications include Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Social Administration. He is a Fellow, Australian Institute of Management and an Associate, Australian College Health Service Executives.

Martin Turner – Chief Executive, Gwent Healthcare NHS Trust, UK

Martin is married with 4 children – lives in Bettws Newydd, Usk – born in Tredegar and has lived in Wales all his life. He has one grand-daughter.

He entered the NHS as a finance trainee with Gwent Health Authority in 1969. After qualifying as an accountant he held several posts within the Authority, the most senior being that of Deputy Treasurer. In 1986 he accepted the post of Unit General Manager of Gwent Community Services, providing community, mental health and ambulance services for the population of the whole of Gwent (450,000).

His transfer to acute services came in 1990 when he was appointed Unit General Manager of the South Gwent Health Unit. In the succeeding three years he was responsible for the submission of a successful application for conversion to trust status and on 1 April 1993 he became Chief Executive of the newly established Glan Hafren NHS Trust. with an annual turnover of £123 Million and 5500 staff.

Following reconfiguration of Trusts in Wales in 1999, the former Glan Hafren Trust, Gwent Community Health Trust and Nevill Hall & District Trust merged to form a single trust for the whole of Gwent. Martin is now Chief Executive of Gwent Healthcare NHS Trust which provides a comprehensive range of services for approximately 600,000 people. The Trust has a budget of over £450 Million and employs some 13,000 staff. During 2000 he spent 3 months in Harvard University where he successfully completed the Senior Management Programme.

He has acted as lead surveyor for the King’s Fund Accreditation process, advising other trusts on their organisational and management arrangements. He has also participated in the King’s Fund Development Programme involving educational and consultancy tours of the UK, United States and Sweden. He was commissioned by the European Union to advise it and the Lithuanian Government on the development of health services in that country. Most recently he has undertaken consultancy work in Jamaica.

Martin is Chairman of the Institute of Health Service Management in Wales; Fellow of the Chartered Association of Certified Accountants and a member of their Council; Fellow of the Centre for Health Leadership, Wales; Member of the British Institute for Management; and Vice Chairman of the All Wales Trust Chief Executives Group in Wales.

John Coughlin – Vice President, Corporate Services, Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital, Canada

John Coughlin is currently Senior Vice President, Corporate Services, at Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. John obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Windsor, with a double major in economics and political science. John went on to obtain a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Windsor, in 1976 and was called to the Bar for the Province of Ontario in 1978.

John practiced law in the area of civil litigation with the McTague Law Firm in Windsor for 5 years before joining Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital, as Director of Human Resources. He has held progressively more responsible positions in the organization at the Vice President level since 1986. He has had responsibility for Human Resources, Organizational Development, Health and Safety, Physical Plant, Renovations and New Construction, Information Services, and Health Records, as well as providing legal advice to the hospital. In 1989, John received a Certificate from the School of Business, at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario upon completion of The Queen’s Executive Program. John is the Executive Lead for the LEAN program at Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital.

Scott Jeffers – GM, Global Supply Chain & Lean Initiatives, GE Healthcare, USA

Scott Jeffers is the current General Manager of Global Supply Chain & Lean Initiatives for GE Healthcare’s Clinical Systems division. In this role he leads the overall coordination of global manufacturing initiatives, strategic supplier development, and Lean Six Sigma deployment across GE’s Ultrasound, Monitoring, Cardiology, Bone Densitometry, Maternal-Infant Care, and Life Support Solutions businesses. Clinical Systems is a $4.3 billion segment of GE Healthcare, developing innovative technologies that improve clinical precision at every point of patient care.

Prior to this role, Scott served as the General Manager of Americas Customer Fulfillment and operationally supported over 500 sales reps and $1.3 billion in America’s distribution. His team delivered unprecedented improvements in customer-facing support using the Toyota Production System principles. Scott also led two manufacturing Plants for GE Healthcare, the most recent of which won the 2003 Wisconsin Manufacturer of the Year Award and OSHA VPP certification honors. This GE “top plant” was the origination point of many of GE’s Lean tools, including the widely used GE Lean Deployment Guide.

Before GE, Scott was an Officer in the U.S. Air Force and ran research programs for Wright Laboratory in Florida, and joint programs between the Air Force, Dept of Energy, NASA, and EPA in New Mexico. Most notably was his involvement with the Cassini Mission to Saturn, which launched from Florida in 1997 & entered Saturn’s orbit in 2004.

Scott holds a Bachelors Degree in Physics from Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota, and a Masters in Public Administration from the University of West Florida.