Eliminating Cost while Enhancing Customer Value
Sunday, April 21
9:00 am – 4:00 pm (lunch provided)
Instructor: Christopher W. Miller, PhD, NPDP, President Innovation Focus, Inc.
A customer centered and creative approach to value analysis (the Unilever approach), this one-day workshop will help you unleash the power of your organization. You'll learn to design a customer-centered cost reduction project; facilitate an effective cost reduction effort; and how to select tools and techniques that will help you and your team be more customer-centered
Topics
- Making a contract with your customer and your management – the charter and team formation
- Discovery – understanding customer value and emerging capability, getting beyond the obvious
- Synthesis – Identifying problems worth solving
- The creativity workshop – finding ideas where you want them
- Ideas to action – Portfolio and path development
- Bringing new ideas into old organizations – fighting the organizational antibodies
Key Learning Outcomes
After attending this course, attendees should be able to:
- Design a customer centered cost reduction project
- Facilitate an effective cost reduction effort
- Select tools and techniques that will help their team be more customer centered
- Build a customer centered, fact based cost reduction strategy
Who Should Attend
Process engineers and mid-to-upper level manufacturing managers within the paper manufacturing industry with an interest in cost management and reduction will find this course beneficial. Experience in cost reduction and related activities would be helpful.
About the Instructor
Chris Miller is the past President of the Board of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) and the CEO and Founder of Innovation Focus Inc. He has 25 years of experience enhancing and refining products from a broad array of industries for the benefit of the customer and the company. This experience includes work with over 3000 innovation projects. His application of innovation processes to cost reduction came out of his work with Phillips in benchmarking Unilever cost reduction efforts.
A Certified New Product Development Professional (NPDP) Miller has co-authored 4 PDMA books on innovation processes and written over 200 articles on the topic. His clients include companies such as Weyerhaeuser, Johnson & Johnson, AARP, Delphi Automotive, Parker Hannifin and many others. He currently sits on the Board of Trustees of the PA College of Art & Design.
Cost
The cost for this course is only 500 USD, which includes lunch and course materials. This special rate is being offered to TAPPI for this one-time workshop.