Joseph LaCount

Corporate Continuous Improvement Leader, Global Operations Cargill

Joseph R. LaCount specializes in Business Process Improvement. For over 38 years he has led quality engineering, quality management and Business process improvement efforts in the Agriculture, Aerospace & Defense, Automotive, Printing, Retail, Education, Food & Beverage, Service and Healthcare Industries. Some of the Organizations Joe has had the privilege to work with include: Honeywell, Textron, Alexandria Industries, Target, General Electric, R.R. Donnelley, St. Jude Medical and Cargill. He also ran his own consulting business, providing on-site Quality and Lean Six Sigma consulting and training services for a variety of Industries and Organizations. Joe has hands-on experience working with an Organization’s entire value chain. These efforts included improving Manufacturing, Marketing, Finance, HR, IT, Customer/Donor Relations, Recruitment, On-Boarding, Customer-facing processes as well as improving product/service quality and delivery. Joe joined Cargill in 2009 as a Master Black Belt in the Tartan Process Improvement Group and has held various continuous improvement roles in Cargill. Joe’s current role is Corporate Continuous Improvement Leader, working in the Global Operations group.

Monday, Jan 29: Pre-Conference Workshops, Focus Days & Main Conference Day One

11:40 AM C2: Rapid Scaling of Competency Learning to Inspire Continuous Improvement for Everyone (“CI4E”) at Cargill

Over the past year, Cargill has expanded Lean Six Sigma structured problem-solving accessibility, increased usage, and standardized learning processes throughout its global enterprise. Capability building offerings today range from White Belt to Master Black Belt with blended learning classes also available in English, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish. The focus now shifts to implementing a closed loop system that reduces end-to-end deployment variation from defining an initial project and completing training to enabling and sustaining a population of problem solvers and a global team of enduring practitioners.

In this session, you will learn to: 

• Define your deployment process and identify its stakeholders 

• Discover the variation in and between deployment sub-processes 

• Use data and listening posts to reveal what’s working and what’s not 

• Rely upon governance to guide cycles of refinement and improvement 

• Build Competency-based learning paths as a complement to Belt-level training

• Understand what the Knowing – Doing Gap is and deploying a strategy to close it 

Check out the incredible speaker line-up to see who will be joining Joseph.

Download The Latest Agenda