Conferences

Past Conferences Workshops
& Discussion Groups

Grab More Market Share
How to Wrangle Market Share from Lazy Competitors

NEW ORLEANS, LA, FALL 2011—Facilitated by: Ross Shafer • Culture shifts are accelerating - and causing faster upheavals in your target market's "buying mood." If you notice these shifting trends (while your competitors ignore them) you will be in the best position to win the extra business. Organizations that dominate an industry pay almost obsessive attention to how and when humanity evolves (as well as how quickly technology either leads or follows). Topics covered include:

How you can monitor the rise and fall of your competitors - on a daily basis - so you'll know which of their weaknesses to attack.

How to spot new trends before it's too late. You are given the tools to exploit a trend before your competition catches on and will learn how great organizations innovate before they have to.

How these outliers are destroying the usual paths to complacency and replacing them with new highways for profiteering

Increasing revenue with Social Media
Strategy development, execution, and measurement

NEW ORLEANS, LA, FALL 2011—Facilitated by: Neil Reeve-Newson, LinxSmart Inc.; Ryan Barichello, LinxSmart Inc.; Norm Angrove, PPG Canada Inc. A key element of any marketing campaign should include an effective mix of marketing including social media. In this workshop, you will develop a Social Media Strategy designed to specifically reach your company’s goals. Your strategy will entail components such as; Clarifying your Goals, Determining Connections, Discovering your Key Contributors, Content Strategy, Social Accounts, and Website Integration.

Process Mapping for Understanding

NEW ORLEANS, LA, FALL 2011—Facilitated by: Brett Bialowas, PPG Business Solutions • Lean professionals utilize Value Stream Maps as a diagnostic measure to highlight waste in a system (the value stream) that affect cycle time negatively. They are extremely powerful, high-level “pictures” of process performance that identify areas of greatest improvement opportunities. However, they cannot tell us what is wrong or what needs to be changed, but only where we should start. Whether we perceive a process to be a certain way or have no idea what the process looks like, it becomes necessary to drill down to the next level of detail to gain a clear understanding before changing anything. Process Mapping for Understanding workshop will teach you simple mapping techniques beyond Value Stream Mapping that you can use to understand, analyze, and improve any process within your business.

Performance through Strong Employee Relations
How to Solve Problems with People

NEW ORLEANS, LA, FALL 2011—Facilitated by; Frank Lefebvre and Mike Gunnells, PPG Business Solutions • Strong positive employee relations are a critical factor for operating a successful business and even more critical when implementing new processes and plans for improving performance. Leaders get performance results through people, its vital that all people are treated as individuals. Effectively handling problems that occur with people along with the daily use of foundations for good relations, leaders will earn loyalty and build strong positive employee relations. In this workshop participants will learn the foundations for good employee relations and a proven 4-Step method for efficiently and effectively handling problems with people.The Lean Journey in Collision—A road map to implementation

With Jim Berkey & Randy Dewing

PALM SPRINGS, CA, SPRING 2011—The failure rate while implementing Lean is far too high. On one hand this can be discouraging. On the other hand, those successful in implementing changes to their shop culture and process performance can rest assured they will enjoy a competitive edge that others will envy. Thinking Lean and actually implementing are two different things. There is no one specific path that everyone must follow to implement Lean and develop processes with less waste. That being said, we at PPG have had an opportunity to work with customers on implementing Lean for years now, and there are some critical steps we go through when we work successfully with customers. This workshop will be focused on reviewing a comprehensive implementation plan that can be used as a starting point for those who have not yet started a Lean journey or as a benchmark for those who are somewhere on the implementation journey, perhaps not making as much progress as desired and simply need to re-focus. Covering critical areas such as:

360^o Marketing Systems—With Norm Angrove & John Martin

PALM SPRINGS, CA, SPRING 2011—In this highly interactive session, you will be building a personalized marketing plan for your business. Starting with a marketing template each participant will then focus on the target audiences and marketing techniques to attract and retain customers. Led by the marketing experts of the MVP Business Solutions team, Norm Angrove and John Martin, this two hour workshop will highlight the practical tools collision center owners and managers can use in their business. Building on the 360º Marketing Systems seminar, the workshop will include the strategy and needs of connecting with the four generations in the marketplace, social media engagement, elevating the customer experience and new insurer communication opportunities.

Value Stream Mapping—With Mike Gunnells, Robb Power, Tim Fitzgerald & Frank Lefebvre

PALM SPRINGS, CA, SPRING 2011—The power of using the Value Stream Map as a way of aligning your organization around greatest area of waste elimination opportunity. Whether you are just beginning the lean journey or find yourself answering the question, “what comes next”, we have a proven methodology for clearly defining the current state of your process and highlighting for your organization the areas of opportunity for cycle time reduction and waste elimination. The Value Stream Mapping tool has been and currently is being used by many industries as a visual tool to clearly define where cycle time is being wasted within a process. Change is difficult for all of us. We know that we must make changes to the process to get process improvement. We also know that it is possible to go through the tough work of making process changes without impacting bottom line results. So it is important that we have a way of routinely evaluating where our real next opportunity lies in driving waste from our collision center process.

Using a value stream map effectively does two things. First of all it shows leadership and the rest of the organization where the leakage in cycle time is occurring. Second and just as important it is a very visual tool that is critical in aligning the organization around the target area of opportunity. This is a data driven method that takes some of the emotion from the change process. This workshop will include exercises around the construction of a value stream map with participants using their own shop data to develop their own map depicting their own performance. The workshop includes:

Load Leveling—With Mark Mueller, Brett Bialowas & David Knapp

PALM SPRINGS, CA, SPRING 2011—The impact of leveling the volume and mix to a process and practical applications in collision. Most if not all collision centers are faced with high levels of variation in the incoming work to the shop. There is the classic dilemma of pressure to take too many sets of keys based upon current levels of work in the shop versus the real fear of losing those keys to the competition. As cycle time became a critical measure we started learning more about the relationship between work in process inventory at the shop, and the cycle time at the shop. As we know, as car count increases, so does cycle time. Thus it is more important now than ever before to influence incoming work flow to any degree possible. The purpose of this workshop is to first look at the impact that variation in work volume and mix has on the process and then to explore practical work load leveling systems that have been used within collision center businesses. The workshop includes:

Open Discussion Group—Your Topic, Your Discussions—
Mike Gunnells and Frank Lefebvre

ORLANDO, FL, FALL 2010—This was one of more popular discussion groups at our last conference in San Diego. Join your peers in this free wheeling session where the floor is open for all your ideas on everything collision related. Our master facilitators will help keep the discussions on track and will add guidance when needed but this session is about your ideas and sharing while learning from one another.

Barriers to Peak Performance Excellence—Tim Fitzgerald and David Knapp

ORLANDO, FL, FALL 2010—Ever wonder what’s holding your organization back from achieving greatness? This session will examine some of those reasons as you share your personal experiences and achievements with your peers and that will open up the possibilities of what could really be accomplished -- through communication, vision and acceptance of the possibilities of breaking down the barriers to greatness. Our expert team of facilitators will carefully guide this discussion as you share with your peers the systems and work involved with achieving your own peak performance plan.

Marketing Strategies—Norm Angrove and John Martin

ORLANDO, FL, FALL 2010—In this highly interactive session you and your peers will be sharing your marketing experiences, successes and the challenges that will need to be faced in the future. This discussion will include the strategy and needs of connecting with the four generations in the marketplace, social media engagement and new insurer communication opportunities. Led by our Business Solutions team of Marketing experts this session is surely a don’t miss opportunity to improve your marketing approach through learning from the experience of others and sharing your vision for the future.

Implementing Change—Tom Nicholas and Mark Mueller

ORLANDO, FL, FALL 2010—This discussion group will review the teachings of the previous two days as they pertain to our ability to cause and sustain change. Using the examples of Disney, Marketing Initiatives, Technology Improvements and Interpersonal relationships this discussion will help participants discover new ways of improving their “message” to employees, customers and insurers alike and by doing so help sustain needed change efforts. Through the interactive dialogue with your peers you will leave this session with a clear and much better understanding of what you’ll need to do to cause and sustain change.