Chris Fellin is an FTE Senior Advisor with a 35 years of experience in manufacturing. Throughout his career Chris has led, taught, coached and implemented lean manufacturing strategies and methods.  In all of Chris’ work, he is process oriented and excels in bringing teams together to accomplish transformational change.

Notable Experience and Accomplishments:

• Developed a global process to drive collaboration, transparency, accountability, and readiness on new vehicle programs in the pre-production phase of launch, and led implementation across GM Operations in N. America, China, S. Korea, Brazil and Germany.
• Simultaneously increased issue identification per program six fold and improved issue resolution from 8% to 94%, improved manufacturing readiness metrics from zero to 80%, and improved quality metric achievement from 10% to 99%.
• Authored and implemented the General Motors Global Pre-Production Part Quality Procedure (PPAP) for GM pre-production suppliers. This procedure was a primary enabler for improvements in dimensional quality metric achievement rate from 20% to 85%.
• Served as Technical Assistant to the President of Saturn and was a key member of the team that transformed their manufacturing operations from bottom five to top five in quality and productivity.
• Led GoFast! cultural change initiative to engage all GM North American manufacturing salaried employees in workshops that brought cross-functional teams together to brainstorm top issues and to implement significant changes and continuous improvement. This involved training and certifying 1,200 coaches to engage 15,000 employees in 1,500 workshops in the first year.
• Taught and energized teams to implement standardized work, error proofing, lean material point of use equipment, business and project planning and continuous improvement projects at the GM Oshawa Car plants. Lean accomplishments were key enablers to support plant in earning JD Power quality and Jim Harbor productivity awards.

Prior to FTE, Chris retired from General Motors In 2017 after a 35 year career in manufacturing, quality and financial. He gained expertise in Quality while serving as Operations Quality Manager at GM’s Detroit-Hamtramck Car Assembly, Quality Manager at GM Pre-Production Operations, and Global Pre-Production Quality Process Manager for GM Product Development.

Chris earned a Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Operations Engineering and an MBA from the University of Michigan.  He has previously held certification as a Manager of Quality/Operational Excellence from the American Society of Quality (ASQ) and is an active ASQ member.