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Charles Protzman, MBA, CPM formed Business Improvement Group (B.I.G.), LLC, in November 1997. B.I.G. is located in Baltimore, Maryland. Charlie and his son, Dan, specialize in implementing and training Lean thinking principles and the Lean business delivery system (LBDS) in small to fortune 50 companies involved in Manufacturing, Healthcare, Government and Service Industries. Charles is the coauthor of Leveraging Lean in Healthcare: Transforming Your Enterprise into a High Quality Patient Care Delivery System, recipient of the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award, and the Leveraging Lean in Healthcare Series as well as several other books in process. His son, Dan, is co-author with Charles and Joe McNamara on the new book One-Piece Flow vs. Batching, CRC Press. Charles has over 34 years of experience in materials and operations management. He spent 13¿ years with AlliedSignal, now Honeywell, where he was an aerospace strategic operations manager and the first AlliedSignal Lean master. He has received numerous special-recognition and cost-reduction awards. Charles was an external consultant for Department of Business and Economic Development's (DBED's) Maryland Consortium during and after his tenure with AlliedSignal. He had input into the resulting DBED world class criteria document and assisted in the first three initial DBED world class company assessments. B.I.G. was a Strategic Partner of ValuMetrix Services, a division of Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics, Inc., a Johnson & Johnson company. He is an international Lean consultant and has taught beginner to advanced students courses in Lean principles and total quality all over the world. Charlie Protzman states, "My grandfather started me down this path and has influenced my life to this day. My grandfather made four trips to Japan from 1948 to the 1960s. He loved the Japanese people and culture and was passionate and determined to see Japanese manufacturing recover from World War II." Charles spent the last 18 years implementing successful Lean product line conversions, kaizen events, and administrative business system improvements (transactional Lean) worldwide. He is following in the footsteps of his grandfather, who was part of the Civil Communications Section (CCS) of the American Occupation. Prior to recommending Dr. Deming's 1950 visit to Japan, C.W. Protzman Sr. surveyed over 70 Japanese companies in 1948. Starting in late 1948, Homer Sarasohn and C.W. Protzman Sr. taught top executives of prominent Japanese companies an eight-week course in American participative management and quality techniques in Osaka and Tokyo. Over 5100 top Japanese executives had taken the course by 1956. Many of the lessons we taught the Japanese in 1948 are now being taught to Americans as "Lean principles." The Lean principles had their roots in the United States and date back to the early 1700s and later to Taylor, Gilbreth, and Henry Ford. The principles were refined by Taiichi Ohno and expanded by Dr. Shigeo Shingo. Modern-day champions are Norman Bodek (the Grandfather of Lean), Jim Womack, and Dan Jones. Charles participated in numerous benchmarking and site visits, including a two-week trip to Japan in June 1996, where he worked with Hitachi in a kaizen event. He is a master facilitator and trainer in TQM, total quality speed, facilitation, career development, change management, benchmarking, leadership, systems thinking, high-performance work teams, team building, Myers-Briggs Styles indicator, Lean thinking, and supply chain management. He also participated in Baldridge Examiner and Six Sigma management courses. He was an assistant program manager during "Desert Storm" for the Patriot missile-to-missile fuse development and pro-duction program. Charles is also a member SME, AME, IIE, IEEE, APT, and the International Performance Alliance Group (IPAG), an International team of expert Lean Practitioners (http://www.ipag-consulting.com). Joyce Kerpchar, PA-C, has over 28 years of experience in the health-care industry and currently serves as the director of the Institute for Surgical Advancement at Florida Hospital Orlando, which is part of the Adventist Health System, an acute-care, tertiary hospital caring for more than 1.5 million patients a year. She joined Florida Hospital in 2001 and spent over five years as a senior consultant implementing Lean across the eight campuses in a variety of clinical departments, is a Six Sigma black belt, and is a certified MBTI instructor. Joyce is a co-author of Leveraging Lean in Healthcare: Transforming Your Enterprise into a High Quality Patient Care Delivery System, Recipient of the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award. Kerpchar began her career as a board-certified physician's assistant in cardiovascular and thoracic surgery and primary care medicine. Prior to joining Florida Hospital, she held a variety of administrative positions in health-care-related industries, which included managed care operations and contracting for a PruCare/Prudential Healthcare that served 200,000 members in nine counties in Central Florida, product management for Avio Corporation, as a provider of information technology for ambulatory health-care organization, and as a partner in a consulting firm that specialized in business and market entry strategy for high-tech start-ups. Kerpchar is passionate about leveraging Lean in health-care processes to eliminate waste and reduce errors, to improve the overall quality, and to reduce the cost of providing health care. Fred Whiton, MBA, PMP, PE, has 30 years of experience in the aerospace and defense industry, which includes engineering, operations, program and portfolio management, and strategy development. He is employed as a senior vice president with CACI at the time of this book's publication. Fred has both domestic and international expertise within homeland security, communications command and control intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance sensors and services, military and commercial aerospace systems, and defense systems supporting the U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Intelligence Community across a full range of functions from marketing, concept development, engineer-ing, and production into life cycle sustainment and logistics. Fred began his career as a design engineer at General Dynamics, was promoted to a group engineer at Lockheed Martin, and was a director at Northrop Grumman within the Homeland Defense Government Systems team. As vice president of engineering and operations at Smiths Aerospace, he was the Lean champion for a Lean enterprise journey, working closely with Protzman as the Lean consultant, for a very successful Lean implementation within a union plant, including a new plant designed using Lean principles. Prior to joining CACI, he was vice president and general manager of the Tactical Communications and Network Solutions Line of Business within DRS Technologies. Fred has a BS in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland, an MS in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a master's in engineering administration from The George Washington University, and an MBA from The University of Chicago. He is a professional engineer (PE) in Maryland, a certified project management professional (PMP), served as a commissioner on the Maryland Commission for Manufacturing Competitiveness under Governor Ehrlich, served as a commissioner on the Maryland Commission on Autism under Governor O'Malley, served in the boards of directors for the Regional Manufacturing Institute headquartered in Maryland and the First Maryland Disability Trust.