Many manufacturers have embraced Lean as part of their culture, but not every employee needs to complete a full Lean Certification program. That’s where Lean Manufacturing Basics training provides tremendous value.

A successful Lean culture depends on more than just a few Lean champions or continuous improvement leaders. It works best when employees across the entire organization understand the concepts, terminology, and goals behind Lean initiatives. When everyone is speaking the same language, improvement efforts become more effective.

For manufacturers, one of the biggest benefits is improved employee engagement. When people understand why changes are being made and how Lean supports efficiency and quality, they are more likely to contribute ideas and participate in improvement efforts. Instead of viewing Lean as something driven by management, employees begin to see how their own actions impact performance and results.

Lean Basics is also an excellent onboarding tool. New hires can quickly learn the principles and terminology used throughout the organization, helping them become productive contributors faster and integrate more easily into an existing Lean culture.

Another advantage is stronger communication across departments. Whether employees work in production, quality, maintenance, engineering, materials management, inventory control, or administration, a shared understanding of Lean concepts helps teams collaborate more effectively and solve problems together.

Most importantly, Lean Basics helps employees feel more confident. By understanding common Lean terminology and workplace practices, they are better equipped to participate in discussions, identify waste, and support continuous improvement initiatives.

Not every employee needs a Lean Certification, but every employee can benefit from understanding the fundamentals. Lean Basics provides the knowledge, confidence, and common language needed to strengthen your Lean culture and ensure continuous improvement remains everyone’s responsibility.

IMC’s Exploring Lean Manufacturing Basics program gives employees a practical introduction to Lean principles without the time commitment of a certification program. In just a few hours, participants gain an understanding of key concepts such as customer value, continuous improvement, waste reduction, process flow, root cause analysis, and problem-solving techniques like PDCA and 5 Whys.

The strongest Lean organizations aren’t built by a handful of experts—they’re built when everyone understands the basics.

To register for one of IMC’s “Exploring Lean Manufacturing Basics” click this LINK.

Contact us to discuss customization and onsite delivery of Lean Basics or any of our training programs.

The State College Session has been cancelled. Consider joining us in Williamsport.

Click here for more information.

Lean Manufacturing Level One Practitioner Certification

Become the Lean Leader Your Team Deserves

(7 session, in-person, State College, PA)

This program starts in:

Ready to stop talking about Lean and start leading it?
The Lean Manufacturing Level One Practitioner Certification is IMC’s powerhouse; hands-on training program built for doers! Across seven high-impact sessions from September 23 through December 16, you’ll learn to eliminate waste, boost performance, and deliver real results where it matters most: on the floor.

This isn’t just training. It’s transformation – with a credential to prove it.

Seats are Limited – Secure Yours Now for Only $1,995!

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Why This Program Works

• Real Tools, Real Results – Go beyond buzzwords with A3 Thinking, Value Stream Mapping, SMED, 5S, and more; then use them immediately back at your plant.
• Coached to Succeed – Certified Lean experts work with you one-on-one to guide your improvement project and make sure it delivers measurable gains.
• Respected Certification – Earn your Lean Manufacturing Practitioner Certificate and show leadership you’re ready to drive continuous improvement.
• Collaborate & Compete – Learn alongside peers from across the region, swap ideas, and push each other to raise the bar.

Who Should Register

• Front-line supervisors, team leaders, and shift coordinators
• Quality, engineering, and continuous improvement professionals
• Anyone serious about unlocking Lean results on the shop floor

Get Ready to

• Lead change and guide teams through high-impact, high-energy projects that produce exceptional results – impressing managers and increasing your contribution value to the business.
• Streamline your operations by identifying bottlenecks, eliminating waste, and transforming chaos into clarity – fast-tracking improvements leadership can see and measure.
• Communicate like a Lean expert by confidently using data, visuals, and proven methods that get people aligned, engaged, and taking action.
• Elevate your professional reputation by becoming the person who doesn’t just understand Lean – but delivers it, owns it, and drives it forward.

Lean Manufacturing Level One Practitioner Certification Flyer

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Your Certification Journey

This seven-session program has the following topical sessions:

• A3 Thinking & Team Communication – September 23
• Value Stream Mapping & Gemba Walks – October 7
• Root Cause Analysis & 5S – October 21
• SMED (Quick Changeover) & Visual Controls – November 4
• Onsite Gemba & Project Coaching – November 18
• Standard Work, Project Updates & Capstone Simulation – December 2
• Final Project Report-out & Celebration – December 16

Click here for session day details.

Where

All sessions will be held at the Technology Center in University Park, PA (Centre County), with the exception of November 18, which will be held at an IMC manufacturing client’s facility.

Instructor

Nico de Sousa Serro, Lean/Continuous Improvement Expert

Nico is a Lean/Continuous Improvement content expert at an IMC sister-center where he is responsible for facilitating organizational continuous improvement efforts, implementation of Lean methodologies, and creating Lean/CI content. This involves developing onsite collaborative solutions and training, as well as conducting training and education courses. Nico has extensive experience in process improvement and Lean philosophy implementation, having driven many initiatives on manufacturing plant floor settings. Nico served as the Continuous Improvement Manager at Chelten House Products and held various roles within quality, production, and warehousing at the Pepsi Bottling Group. Nico championed several Six Sigma and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) initiatives, in addition to maintaining ISO 22000 plant quality standards. Nico holds a bachelor’s degree in business with dual concentrations in Operations and Supply Chain Management and Economics from Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business. Nico also holds a Green Belt Six Sigma certification from Vilanova University.

This training qualifies for WEDnetPA funding for qualified participants. Not familiar with WEDnetPA funding, contact IMC at info@imcpa.com.

Lean Manufacturing Practitioner Certification

(5-day, in-person, Williamsport, PA)

This program starts in:

Imagine being able to pinpoint areas within your operations where resources are being underutilized, or unnecessary steps are slowing down production. Through practical, hands-on workshops, you’ll learn how to systematically improve these processes, leading to reduced expenses and improved profitability. The Lean Manufacturing Practitioner Certification is your gateway to transforming your manufacturing processes and driving significant improvements in your business. By participating in this certification program, you will gain essential skills to identify and eliminate wasteful practices, ultimately saving costs and increasing efficiency.

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Register now for only $1,795 per person!

Learning Objectives:

This course equips you with the ability to:

• Foster a culture of continuous improvement within your organization
• Understand and apply lean tools such as value stream mapping, workplace organization, change management, teaming and kaizen methodology
• Learn collaborative problem-solving techniques
• Enhance overall productivity and employee engagement
• Turn data into actionable information in order to quantify problems and prioritize countermeasures

Lean Manufacturing Practitioner Certification Flyer

Program Outline:

Day 1 – May 12, 2025

• Introduction to Lean
• Batch Simulation
• Lean Assessment – Value Stream Analysis
• Project Selection – Lean Team vs. Kaizen

 Day 2 – May 13, 2025

• 5S – Sort, Scrub, Shine, Standardize, Sustain
• Managing Constraints
• Load Leveling
• Data Collection
• Single Minute Exchange of Die

Day 3 – May 14, 2025

• Process Flow Design
• Principles of Ergonomics
• Standard Work
• Supermarket Strategy
• Pulling Flow – Kanban

Day 4 – May 15, 2025

• Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)
• Supplier Integration
• Visual Management
• Reporting Results
• Financial Tracking

Day 5 – May 16, 2025

• Creating Implementation Plan
• Communicating Lean
• Continuous Learning of Lean Principles
• Discussion and Q&A

Schedule:

This 5-day (34 hours) program is May 12 thru May 16, 2025. Monday thru Thursday 8:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m., Friday 8:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Register

Register now for only $1,795 per person!

Why should you attend?

• Gain knowledge for using A3 methodologies, improving team communication, reducing collaboration challenges
• Learn the value stream mapping (VSM) process to help you identify waste, reduce lead times, standardize workflows keeping costs low and efficiencies high
• Boost team productivity by making every minute count, streamlining processes to reduce waste and create a safe workplace that fosters innovation
• Improve communication at all levels of your organization, changing hurdles and obstacles into opportunities for change and transition
• Create an individualized roadmap linked to your company objectives that ends frustration and misunderstanding during team efforts

What’s included?

• There will be numerous opportunities to network with peers, gain insights from manufacturing operations that are different from your own and build essential skills that will inspire you for improved performance
• You will receive a training manual complete with all materials necessary for the course
• Stylish commemorative award and certificate of completion
• Light breakfast and lunch during session days

Who should attend?

Production or process managers/supervisors, front-line leaders/supervisors, operations managers, quality control leaders, shift leaders, small business owners, and others who want to increase their knowledge of manufacturing methodologies and advance in their profession.

Instructor:

David Athon, President, Athon Group of GA, LLC, has spent most of his career introducing Lean Enterprise principles into manufacturing and transactional environments. He has developed a unique method of integrating Six Sigma and Lean into a single, balanced system. As a certified instructor in both Six Sigma and Lean, David has been educating and consulting since 1996, starting with Lean Enterprise and Continuous Improvement methodologies, adding Six Sigma to his abilities in 2000. As a Master Black Belt, David has held positions in a variety of industries including apparel, metal office furniture, sheet metal, aerospace and commercial air refrigeration.

This program is WEDnetPA eligible.

Click here for additional information on IMC’s Lean Manufacturing Practitioner Certification program.

For several years the Lockout Tagout (LOTO) category has been listed among OSHA’s Annual Top 10 Most Cited Violations for General Industry. Controlling hazardous energy with appropriate LOTO procedures and equipment is a life or death situation.  According to OSHA, complying with the LOTO standard prevents an estimated 120 fatalities and 50,000 injuries every year.  However, based on the number of violations, injuries and even deaths as an industry we still struggle with compliance.

In this free one-hour webinar we will:

• Cover the requirements of 29 CFR 1910.147 Control of Hazardous Energy
• Provide applicable best practices that can be applied immediately to help with compliance
• Discuss some common issues with LOTO programs
• Discuss some methods to ensure your program is compliant

Instructor

This course will be taught by Food Processing Specialist, Janna Hamlett of TechHelp, and the University of Idaho.

Register

IMC would like to touch base with our “Continuous Improvement Community”, those who have been thru IMC’s lean training programs.

We would like to hear from you and discuss a little about:

• The Current Condition
• The Role of Continuous Improvement Advocates
• Possible Paths for Future Improvement Training and Support from IMC

Register

Once registered, you will receive login information for the conference call.

IMC would like to touch base with our “Continuous Improvement Community”, those who have been thru IMC’s lean training programs.

We would like to hear from you and discuss a little about:

• The Current Condition
• The Role of Continuous Improvement Advocates
• Possible Paths for Future Improvement Training and Support from IMC

Register

Once registered, you will receive login information for the conference call.

Physical assets are capital intensive and for many organizations are considered to be the life blood of their business.  No enterprise can expect to achieve peak performance unless these assets reliably perform at optimal levels.  To achieve operational excellence your overall Asset Performance Management (APM) strategy needs to be proactive and effective. Many asset-intensive organizations continue to use break-fix maintenance plans to manage their production assets. Not only does this reactive approach increase cost through increased downtime and lost production, but unplanned shutdowns or failures can lead to environmental health and safety incidents. Good APM has been proven to reduce unplanned downtime, increase asset availability, decrease maintenance costs, and reduce the risk of failure for assets that are most critical to operations.

By including proactive Root Cause Analysis (RCA) as a core component of your APM strategy, you can improve:

• Availability – Assets are consistently available to perform
• Reliability – Assets perform their intended function consstently avoiding any operational interruption

This webinar will address the core components of (APM) and how an effective RCA process will support increased asset performance and cost control.

At the end of this webinar you will:

1. Recognize the typical pitfalls/barriers/deficiencies in APM programs
2. Understand how KT Proactive RCA Tools address these typical pitfalls
3. Learn how to build a Collaborative Culture of Continuous Improvement

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By clicking above, I acknowledge and agree to Informa’s Terms of Service and to Informa’s use of my contact information to communicate with me about offerings by Informa, its brands, affiliates and/or third-party partners, consistent with Informa’s Privacy Policy. In addition, I understand that my personal information will be shared with any sponsor(s) of the resource, so they can contact me directly about their products or services. Please refer to the privacy policies of such sponsor(s) for more details on how your information will be used by them.

Learn how today’s digital plant and its connected workforce accelerate and sustain Lean initiatives to drive greater productivity and efficiency, lower cost of ownership, and increase profitability.

Discover how a code-free, centralized environment to aggregate, visualize, and analyze data in context across plant systems facilitates Lean and other programs as well as helps to maintain the momentum from process improvements.

This webinar will include four case studies demonstrating the digital plant in action. With digital technologies and greater insights, you can gain a modern foundation for optimizing operations, improving efficiency, and reducing costs.

Speakers

Ranbir Saini, Sr. Director – Automation, GE Digital

Ranbir Saini is the senior director of product management for Automation Software at GE Digital, which includes the industry-leading iFIX and CIMPLICITY HMI/SCADA software used by thousands of organizations around the world.  Ranbir has nearly 20 years of experience delivering industrial automation, operations management, and media content-creation software to OEM, municipal, and enterprise customers.  He has a passion for designing compelling and innovative solutions in the physical and digital space that make a meaningful difference to customers, human experiences, and society. Outside of work, this passion has led him to venture into architectural design such as residential houses and doors as well as having an ongoing pursuit to create the perfect cup of chai.

Steve Pavlosky, Principal Product Manager, Historian, GE Digital

Steve Pavlosky is the Principal Product Manager for GE Digital’s Proficy Historian and Data at the Edge program. With more than 30 years serving in automation and industrial data management, Steve is an Industrial Internet pioneer and firm believer in the value and power of data. His career spans the introduction of GE’s CIMPLICITY HMI/SCADA software to leading the company’s edge-to-cloud connectivity device portfolio. Having worked with hundreds of customers, Steve is passionate about enabling organizations to get the most performance and reliability from their assets – which starts with secure and efficient collection and storage, contextualizing asset data, and distributing data to the users and applications that derive value from the data.

Register

By clicking above, I acknowledge and agree to Informa’s Terms of Service and to Informa’s use of my contact information to communicate with me about offerings by Informa, its brands, affiliates and/or third-party partners, consistent with Informa’s Privacy Policy. In addition, I understand that my personal information will be shared with any sponsor(s) of the resource, so they can contact me directly about their products or services. Please refer to the privacy policies of such sponsor(s) for more details on how your information will be used by them.

Do any of these sound like you?

• I’ve got no real maintenance management system. I never have and am intimidated about where to get started.
• I’ve got a system, but I never got it off the ground and don’t feel we get what we need from it.
• I’m making progress, but I would like to further maximize my maintenance operations.

Regardless of where you’re at, kick-starting your maintenance is possible. It starts with changing the mindset of your organization – a process that may be easier than you think if you have the right CMMS tools, plan and especially the right partner. Starting with the goal, objective and pain points first, then moving to how technology can solve those problems and put you on a better path is key.

During this discussion, you’ll learn:

• A multi-step (crawl, walk, run) plan to ease you into a continuous improvement mode and get away from maintenance firefighting
• What technologies can really help improve your operations
• How to arm yourself with information that you can use with your management to show how modernizing/kick-starting your maintenance department will help with profitability

Speakers

Paul Lachance, Senior Manufacturing Advisor, Dude Solutions

Paul Lachance has spent his entire career devoted to optimizing maintenance teams by enabling data-driven decisions and actionable insights. He wrote his first CMMS system in 2004 and has since spent his professional career designing and directing CMMS and EAM systems. A regular speaker at national tradeshows, he’s been featured at IMTS, Fabtech and SMRP as well as several industry magazines. He currently serves as the Senior Manufacturing Advisor for Dude Solutions.

Pete Walker, Production Engineering Manager, Johnson Outdoors Marine Electronics, Inc.

Pete Walker is the Production Engineering Manager at the Humminbird brand Marine Electronics plant in Eufaula Alabama. He has over 35 years experience in PC Board Manufacturing and electronics assembly covering the Automotive, and Consumer Electronics Industries.

Register

By clicking above, I acknowledge and agree to Informa’s Terms of Service and to Informa’s use of my contact information to communicate with me about offerings by Informa, its brands, affiliates and/or third-party partners, consistent with Informa’s Privacy Policy. In addition, I understand that my personal information will be shared with any sponsor(s) of the resource, so they can contact me directly about their products or services. Please refer to the privacy policies of such sponsor(s) for more details on how your information will be used by them.

It’s critical to get the most value possible from your asset management tools to boost reliability and performance and reduce downtime. Intelligent Assets Practice Lead Paul Casto of GrayMatter and Senior Product Marketing Manager Dan Parker of GE Digital will discuss how to craft a successful asset maintenance strategy that balances equipment criticality, predictive and condition-based maintenance and predictive analytics. They will highlight common missteps that can hurt long-term success and detail how Eastman Chemical embraced a comprehensive solution that dropped unscheduled downtime by 60 percent, reduced product loss by 40 percent and cut long-term maintenance costs by 10 percent, saving millions of dollars.

Topics Paul and Dan will cover:

• Reliability
• Availability
• Uptime
• Maintenance cost
• Risk of failure
• Unexpected failures
• Scrap (due to equipment)
• Condition-Based Maintenance
• Life of Capital Equipment

Paul Casto, Intelligent Assets Lead, GrayMatter

Paul Casto is a top practitioner in reliability and maintenance improvement methodologies. He has hands-on experience in reliability, maintenance, operations and engineering in the steel, aluminum, automotive, chemical, aerospace, consumer goods and construction industries. His areas of focus include: value creation through reliability and maintenance, leveraging reliability to reduce operating cost, the application of advanced reliability tools integrating operations into reliability and maintenance, reliability-based maintenance and shop floor culture change. He has previously worked for GE Digital, Meridium and Eastman Chemical Company.

Dan Parker, Senior Product Marketing Manager, GE Digital

Dan Parker is the Sr. Product Marketing Manager for the Asset Performance Management (APM) solution at GE Digital. With more than 10 years of experience in the development and commercialization of enterprise application software solutions, Dan focuses on the delivery of APM solutions that enable asset-intensive chemical companies to drive safer, more reliable operations while maximizing performance and lowering costs. In addition to APM, his product experience includes: Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), and various HMI/SCADA solutions.

Register

By clicking above, I acknowledge and agree to Informa’s Terms of Service and to Informa’s use of my contact information to communicate with me about offerings by Informa, its brands, affiliates and/or third-party partners, consistent with Informa’s Privacy Policy. In addition, I understand that my personal information will be shared with any sponsor(s) of the resource, so they can contact me directly about their products or services. Please refer to the privacy policies of such sponsor(s) for more details on how your information will be used by them.