Robert Bienvenue, Director of Quality, is a technical and management specialist and an educator in the areas of quality management and total quality improvement. Bob's professional career includes sixteen years in quality assurance engineering/management and project engineering/management for programs run by the United States Department of Defense, Air Force and NASA. His recurring responsibilities included quality systems audits of prime and sub contractors to evaluate quality assurance process implementation and effectiveness in meeting performance requirements.

During his ten years with CMS, Bob has worked extensively with organizations developing and implementing quality management systems as well as disciplined preparation for the audit process required for ISO/QS certification. This approach consists of management education, thorough gap assessments, training throughout the organization, and development and implementation of required documentation and processes. To date, every organization CMS supported through this process has achieved certification on the first audit. Bob's ability to attain management support and work effectively with company teams has been key to these successes. His philosophy involves ensuring preparedness while eliminating extraneous documentation and processes. This enables efficient use of resources while attaining registration and long-term maintenance of the quality system.

As part of CMS' training initiative, Bob conducts seminars on ISO 9000, TS 16949, Statistical Process Control, and quality system auditing for industrial and technical organizations. Bob is a trained lead auditor (SGS Int'l Certification Services, Inc.) in ISO 9000, and in quality program assessment, meeting the standard set by the Association of Manufacturing Excellence.

Bob also has considerable expertise in team training, support and facilitation. He has developed a series of courses that enables project teams to operate far more effectively and apply disciplined processes for problem solving to support Lean manufacturing concepts. These teams have achieved results such as sharp reductions in process scrap, improved on-time delivery and streamlining of business processes in service industries.

His academic credentials include a BS in Mechanical Engineering, an MBA, and a long list of professional and technical courses and certifications. He is a contracted trainer within the SUNY Community College system and has served as a consultant and adjunct faculty at the University of Buffalo and Rochester Institute of Technology.

Anthony R. Carlisi, President, established Creative Manufacturing Solutions, Inc. (dba CMS Consulting Group) in 1988, following more than twenty years of industrial and consulting experience. During his industrial career, Tony attained increasingly responsible individual contributor and management positions in product development, process engineering, operations, finance, quality systems and planning. This experience provided the knowledge base for his transition into consulting. He has personally worked with more than 100 organizations in manufacuring, distribution, financial services and health care.

Strong technical, business, and interpersonal skills enable Tony to work effectively with management teams regardless of company size. Typical activities include organizational development, overhead cost reduction, planning/implementing cultural change and developing and implementing company wide systems to support increased operating efficiencies.

As president of CMS, Tony continues to work diligently to identify customer needs and to position CMS to best meet them. The keystone of Tony's business philosophy is his commitment to deliver effective, bottom-line results representing the best value to CMS customers.

Mark Gossoo, Senior Industrial Engineer, has been working in industrial and manufacturing engineering for almost fifteen years. With a Master's Degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Mark's background includes both academic research and industry. He is experienced with many manufacturing processes, including metal fabrication, molding, assembly, machining, brazing, and high-speed packaging. Mark has worked with companies in the automotive, food processing, furniture, industrial products, and computer equipment industries.

He has extensive experience with plant layout and implementation of lean manufacturing techniques. As a result of his work, a recent CMS client achieved a 70% reduction in scrap and rework costs through improved quality management system methodologies. This reduction generated a savings of over $190,000 per year. His work in preventive maintenance includes design and implementation of Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS). Mark has worked with many companies to dramatically reduce manufacturing cycle times by implementing cellular manufacturing, improving material flow and material handling, and optimizing facility design. Working with manufacturing teams, he has instituted changes that reduced direct labor for fabrication of large utility boilers by 30% and reduced downtime on a bottleneck operation by 750 hours per year.

In addition to engineering tasks, Mark has considerable expertise in Information Systems. He is familiar with major computer environments and has done extensive work in programming database applications, developing process simulations and CAD.

Mark also serves on the ISE Advisory Board of Rochester Institute of Technology.

S. Bradford Horton, Director - Lean Systems, has provided material flow/lean improvement support to plants in Rochester, Canada, China, and Mexico for the past 25 years. Brad facilitated several week-long Kaizen Blitz events for Kodak, resulting in setup time reduction of 73% for 100-ton injection molding presses. In the Mexican single use plant, improvements reduced setup time for 7 pieces of packaging equipment by 89%. In addition, he designed the assembly process for the new KB 28 Reloadable camera and implemented the process in a China plant. Working with a single-use component supplier, he redesigned an assembly operation that produced annualized savings of more than $450,000. He also worked with the Advantix plant in Mexico to achieve an overall productivity gain of 384% during a 2-month period.

Brad has worked with smaller companies to achieve significant lean improvements. These include reduced assembly make-ready time by 84% in 2 days, and reduced setup time for 8 drill presses from 35 minutes to 5 minutes during a 2-day Kaizen event. With Brad's guidance, a packing line reduced setup time by more than 50% in 5 months, and reduced assembly process time from 2 weeks to 4 hours during a 3-day Kaizen event.

Over the last 15 years, Brad has delivered over 11,000 hours of lean education and training support. Brad has a BS from SUNY Brockport. He is a member of the Mid-Atlantic Region Board of Directors for the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME), and is a past president of the Board for the Mid-Atlantic Region. He is also a member of the American Production and Inventory Control Society (APICS), and teaches APICS, CIRM and CPIM Certification courses for the Rochester Chapter of APICS. Brad was a key member of the team that developed NIST's series of lean manufacturing courses and is a certified instructor for these courses.

Scott Taylor, Vice President, has over 27 years of experience manufacturing environments at many levels, including plant and manufacturing manager. As Director of Operations for a 300-person manufacturing division, he was responsible for all Production, Manufacturing Engineering, Quality Assurance, Purchasing, Inventory Control and Facilities over two sites. During his tenure there, he initiated Lean principles, including overview training of more than 150 employees. He also implemented several production cells in the legacy section of the business and led the consolidation of a separate division into the Rochester sites. This was accomplished while transforming from traditional production to complete cellular manufacturing. These changes resulted in a space savings of over 50%, reduction of inventory by more than 30% and production throughput from order commitment to delivery of less than 1 week.

Scott was responsible for global Lean implementation and training in Asia, Australia, Europe, Mexico and the United States. His skills cover the entire supply chain: manufacturing, supplier base, distribution centers, and customers. He’s led numerous companies through Value Stream Mapping and improvement implementation, incorporating all techniques and methods of the Lean Enterprise. His manufacturing and business process teams made breakthrough results, improving their Asia-Pacific region NITO (Net Inventory Turnover) by 11.5% and WCTO (Working Capital Turnover) by 19%.

Since his career started on the manufacturing floor, Scott is equally adept at developing a rapport with shop floor employees and company management, presidents and owners. While he's gained considerable global experience, he has a strong desire to assist local companies in growing their businesses using breakthrough change and improving their bottom lines with continuous improvement methods.

Scott holds a Bachelors Degree in Industrial and Mechanical Engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MBA from the Martin J. Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University.