Advisory Board

The Process Excellence Network advisory board consists of key thinkers and thought leaders in the Lean, Six Sigma and Process Excellence space. These seasoned industry experts guide the topics on the Process Excellence Network site in addition to frequently contributing content and media. These industry leaders were selected due to the caliber of their work within their respective areas of expertise.

 

About our Advisors

Francisco Barros Costa

Francisco Barros Costa is a Quality Engineer Master Black Belt at Brazilian Petrochemical company Braskem. He is responsible for the Lean Six Sigma production system for the companies industrial plants based in Brazil, United States and Germany. During his time at Braskem, Francisco has coached more than 400 Green and Black Belts in Six Sigma.
 
Prior to working at Braskem, Francisco worked as a Process Engineer and Master Black Belt at Votorantim Cement and has also worked in manufacturing in leading Brazil-based companies like Camargo Corrêa Cement, Sugar Mill Caeté - Carlos Lyra Group, Furnas Nuclear Power Plants, and Mars Chocolates.

 Back to Top

---

Alan Demers

 As Vice President and Chief Quality Officer, Alan is responsible for driving operational excellence across American Express.  He leads a team of experienced Quality professionals in providing oversight of various strategic initiatives to ensure optimal and sustainable business results. This includes implementation of critical business metrics and ongoing end-to-end process reviews, ensuring a quality framework is around all critical projects, and linking six sigma design efforts to business unit strategies and reengineering efforts.  He was a keynote Speaker at this year’s Lean Six Sigma & Process Improvement 2010 summit whose theme was “Transforming Business Results through Process Optimization”.   He is also a member of the Quality council of The Conference Board which is comprised of executives from companies known to be leaders in performance excellence and quality.

 Back to Top

---

Mark Fendley

Mark Fendley is the Continuous Improvement Manager for BMW Manufacturing in South Carolina. BMW Manufacturing is a subsidiary of BMW AG and the sole global production site for the BMW X5, X6, and X3 vehicles. Fendley has more than 20 years of manufacturing management experience and 17 years of manufacturing and continuous improvement leadership experience in the Japanese and German automotive industry. In his capacity as Continuous Improvement Manager, Fendley is responsible for the Lean Six Sigma, Kaizen and Associate Involvement initiatives at BMW Manufacturing. He leads a team of LSS Master Black Belts, Black Belts and Kaizen Facilitators in an in-house consulting structure that educates and trains the BMW campus in continuous improvement tools and methodologies, and leads LSS projects, Kaizen and Lean transformations. Under his leadership, the continuous improvement training and project support has been expanded to include other BMW divisions, suppliers and dealers.

Mark received his bachelor’s degree in Industrial Management from the Georgia Institute of Technology and is a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt since 2004 and a certified Kaizen Facilitator since 1991.

 

 Back to Top

---

Diane Francisco

Dr. Diane Francisco joined Covance six years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, where she led the Validation team in the Bioanalytical Chemistry group and was responsible for validating bioanalytical methods and supporting pharmacokinetic (PK) and toxicokinetic (TK) studies. Given her success with this team, she was soon asked to lead the Bioanalytical Operations teams. After completing her Master Black Belt training in 2007, Dr. Francisco accepted a position as Associate Director, Master Black Belt, for Early Development. During her tenure in the Process Excellence group, Dr. Francisco introduced both Lean and Design methodologies, making the process improvement initiative more flexible in solving process problems. Her leadership in driving Process Excellence includes advising more than 100 projects that resulted in savings of more than $8 million for Covance.

Prior to Covance, Dr. Francisco held operational and quality leadership positions at Third Wave Technologies, a medical device company, and at Pharmaceutical Product Development Inc. (PPD), as a leader in their early drug development business and bioanalytical departments. Dr. Francisco holds a doctorate in analytical chemistry from Purdue University and Master Black Belt certification from SSA & Company.

In her current role as Director of Client Solutions at Covance, Dr. Francisco is responsible for partnering across Covance and with their clients to deliver meaningful improvements in Commercial and Operational integration that impact cost, quality and delivery.

Dr. Francisco serves on the advisory board for PEX Network. She is an active speaker at IQPC summits and judge for the global Process Excellence Awards.

 Back to Top

---

Brent Harder

Brent Harder is Head of Operational Excellence for Credit Suisse, based in Zürich. He served for ten years in the US Marine Corps as an F/A-18 Fighter Pilot where he participated in Desert Shield and numerous carrier deployments to the western Pacific. After his military service, Brent joined a division of the General Electric Company as the Chief Information Officer for international operations. Several years later, he moved to HSBC in New York as a Senior Vice President for Global Transaction Banking before moving in 2005 to Fidelity Investments. 

 Back to Top

---

Christine Hawkins

Christine is currently employed in an Asia Pacific wide role for Hewlett Packard as the Head of Transformation and acting Chief Operating Officer for India HP. She began her career in the mining and minerals industry working for Rio Tinto using her Bachelor of Science. It was whilst working in management for WMC/BHP Billiton Christine started her Six Sigma and business improvement journey, where she became an accredited Six Sigma Black Belt. In 2002 Christine took a step into the completely different world of service industry as one of the first Master Black Belts at Telstra.

With manufacturing and service six sigma experience, lean, change management, customer intelligence and other quality tool sets Christine’s passion is for driving business improvement using the most appropriate approach. She has been involved in broad business improvement roles in Qantas and Banking and is an adiviser to the Australian Institute of Management and mentor within the Females in IT Network.

 Back to Top

---

John Jarrett

John Jarrett has over 20 years of experience working in the financial services industry across retail banking and head office environments. His primary area of experience is with loan origination and servicing for the independent financial planner and mortgage broker channels. Since 2007, John has led AGF Trust’s BPM program. His role is to lead the business process analyst team to meet AGF Trust’s mandate to increase the level of process maturity in the organization, to extend BPM across the enterprise, and to innovate existing processes.

 Back to Top

---

Yew Ker Ling

Yew Ker Ling is currently the VP (COE) of SingTel Group. COE is responsible for innovating, incubating and inculcating business best practices to enable and empower the lines of business to deliver sustainable values, operational excellence and distinctive Customer Experience. These business practices include Lean Six Sigma, Business Process Management, Customer Experience and eBusiness. In 2011, Ker Ling led the team in winning the world-class IQPC Process Excellence Award for the Best Start Up Program “Where EAGLE dares” in the United States; as well as the Asian IQPC Process Excellence Award (Service Sector) for Lean Six Sigma project.

 Back to Top

---

Evandro Lorentz

Evandro Lorentz is a professional consultant and post-graduate professor, teaching courses related to leadership and management systems. He is also currently Vice-President of the Brazilian Academy of Quality (ABQ) and heads the organization of the Brazilian Society for Quality and Excellence in Management (SBQEG).

Between 1979 and 2009, Evandro worked at Usiminas, a Brazilian steelworks working in areas as diverse as Automation, Industrial Direction Advisory, Quality Management, Technology Transfer, and Project Management Office (PMO) Investments Leader. His international experience includes periods of training in Japan, discussions with Argentinean institutions about products certification, the development of a quality management system to a Chilean steelworks, and the technology negotiation with Europeans, Arabs, Japanese, and Chinese.

Evandro has a degree in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, and post-graduated in Automation. He earned his M.Sc. Degree in Engineering at Federal University of Minas Gerais State, Brazil and also post-graduated in Business Management by Fundacao Getulio Vargas. He is also an ASQ Fellow and received the ASQ In Recognition Award and ASQ Century Club Award.

 Back to Top

---

Christian Loyer

Christian Loyer is currently plant manager for Ecolab. He was previously EMEA LSS Deployment Leader for Ecolab EMEA and prior to that he was Director Business Process at Masterlease, a full leasing provider, which is part of GMAC. Loyer was responsible for the Lean Six Sigma deployment for all 17 Masterlease countries. Previous to this role, he was vice president Six Sigma at Metronet Rail.

Loyer’s background is in industrial engineering, and he has experience with Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizens, 5S, and project management in both transactional services and operational manufacturing environments.

Loyer is a certified Master Black Belt since 2005, and he started his Lean Six Sigma career as a Black Belt in 1998 for Bombardier Aerospace. He completed his Executive MBA at the University of Nottingham.
 

 Back to Top

---

John Macdonald

John Macdonald is Global Manager Business Processes at TNT Express where he leads a cross functional process design authority team, linking strategic requirements to front line capabilities and acts as the key facilitator of strategic innovation change programs. He has over 10 years of process model development, implementation and day to day practical experience coupled with over two decades of experience in the express and postal supply chain market, working in a variety roles and international placements.

His early career consisted of developing operational capabilities in the former eastern European bloc and with postal partners in Latin America. More recently he has been working at TNT's corporate head offices developing the company’s EFQM and Quality management approaches.  He is also a Certified EFQM Master Assessor and has an MBA from Strathclyde Business School.

 Back to Top

---

Michael Marx

Michael Marx is a continuous improvement practitioner with a decade of experience researching and writing for the Lean Six Sigma process improvement industry. He is currently working for Apollo Group, leading continuous improvement projects in the higher education industry at the University of Phoenix. He has worked for SSA & Company (formerly Six Sigma Academy) and iSixSigma. While at SSA he was trained and earned his Six Sigma Black Belt certification. He is passionate about process, problem solving, Six Sigma, Lean, research, marketing, social networking and everything about the web.

 Back to Top

---

John Murphy

Mr. John R. Murphy is currently Assistant Vice President, Operations Process Excellence headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida. Originally from Montana, John holds degrees in Management and Marketing, and an MBA with concentration in Transportation. Employed with CSX since 1982, he has held a number of positions at the Company in the areas of Terminal Management, Railcar Asset Management, Operations Planning, Economic Analysis, Budget Planning & Reporting, and in the creation of CSX’s Six Sigma, Lean and Process Excellence programs. In the course of his process work, Mr. Murphy has completed CSX’s Blackbelt and Master Blackbelt programs. CSX’s Operational Excellence programs routinely compete in International Quality competitions and CSX hosts ASQ Regional International competitions. 

Member of:

• Board of Trustees – Saint Thomas Academy, Mendota Heights, MN
• Corporate Executive Board – Operations Leadership Exchange
• Customer Advisory Board – Quality Group
• American Society of Quality, Senior Member
• PEX Network North America/Europe Advisory Board & International Quality Judge

 Back to Top

---

Dennis Narlock

Dennis Narlock is the Continuous Improvement Leader for Catalent Pharma Solutions in Middleton, Wisconsin. He is an ASQ certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and a Theory of Constraints Jonah with more than six years of experience in continuous process improvement. He has held positions as a Black Belt and Deployment director within the U.S. Navy where he served for 24 years prior to transitioning to the private sector. He earned a Master of Science degree in Global Leadership from the University of San Diego. His work with the Process Excellence group at IQPC has been recognized with project awards in the Best New Start-up and Innovation categories; in addition he has been a conference presenter and judge.  Dennis can be reached at dennis.narlock@gmail.com

 Back to Top

---

Vince Pierce

Vince Pierce is Vice President of Business Transformation at Office Depot and has responsibility for providing the leadership, direction and oversight for continuous process improvement activities across the company.

Vince is a seasoned executive with over 15 years of leadership experience delivering improved results through global business process improvement and operational excellence.  Most recently, he held the position of Managing Director of Operations for Durabante, a management consulting firm offering strategic planning and business improvement services.  In this role, Vince led a broad range of initiatives resulting in significant improvements in business performance.  Prior to Durabante, Vince held a number of roles with increasing responsibility over a 10-year period at Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company.  In his last role as a partner at Accenture, he was responsible for leading operational excellence for their $5 billion business process outsourcing division that included implementing process management practices and leading global business transformation efforts.

Vince is a graduate of Cabrini College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Organizational Management along with AAS in Industrial Engineering from Delaware Technical College.  He is a Lean and Six Sigma Master Black Belt expert.

 Back to Top

---

JD Rapp

JD Rapp is Vice President of BPM and Management Excellence at Whirlpool Corporation. Primarily a finance professional, he has held a variety of roles at Whirlpool including industrial engineering, operations, and innovation as well as leading Whirlpool's Lean Sigma program. Rapp achieved Master Black Belt certification in 1999.

 Back to Top

---

Debashis Sarkar

Debashis Sarkar is one of world’s leading lights in the space of service Lean. Over the last few years he has been researching, experimenting and working on how to successfully implement the Lean principles to service companies. He has led large number of Lean service transformations and his efforts have led to the pioneering contribution to service lean comprising: A) The DEB-LOREX™ model, B) holistic approach for service lean implementation and C) blueprint for 5S implementation in service companies. The details of these have been encapsulated in his books titled: Lean for Service Organizations and Offices–Holistic Approach for Achieving Operational Excellence (ASQ Press, 2008) and 5S for Service Organizations and Offices–A Lean Look at Improvement (ASQ Press, 2006). Sarkar is a much sought after speaker. He is also the first person in Asia to have successfully led the lean deployment in a service business.

Sarkar is currently Global Champion & Head (Asia-Pacific) - Enterprise Lean Sigma at Avery Dennison. Prior to that Sarkar lead the Organizational Excellence function at ICICI Bank and is credited to have authored its quality strategy and other enterprise-wide improvement program. He has also held leadership positions in companies such as Unilever, Coca Cola and Marico Industries.

 Back to Top

---