Michael Phelps is an FTE Senior Advisor with over 36 years of manufacturing operations and material delivery logistics experience. He has culminated an extensive background in operations leadership with an emphasis on continuous improvement processing, lean manufacturing, and people systems. Michael has demonstrated the ability to lead organizations through complex situations by delivering projects on time, within budget, improving safety, increasing people engagement, quality, throughput, and reducing operating costs. His expertise includes process improvement, maintenance optimization, staffing and employee development, team engagement and the implementation of lean principles.

Notable experience and accomplishments:

• Facilitated multi-site Manufacturing and Logistics Operations continuous improvement projects
  • Trained Lean Manufacturing SME leaders on employee safety, people engagement, quality, standardization practices and throughput.
  • Achieved over $6.2M annual cost savings ranging from automotive stamping, body shop, general assembly and material logistics CI project implementations.
• Led a production organization through a $270M greenfield contiguous stamping site program product launch including pre-production planning, operator training and production operation startup validation and execution.
  • Achieved OEM $1.3M annual operating costs savings within the first year of SOP.
  • Transformed an existing brownfield stamping facility into an operational best practice model of a team-based CI culture during installation and startup of two new $42M XL transfer press stamping systems.
• Spearheaded material delivery logistics organization into a continuous improvement focused culture utilizing lean manufacturing principle tools.
  • Facilitated implementation of Business Plan Deployment Plan, Do, Check and Act process cascading through departmental managers, supervisors, and team leader levels to align all organizational goals, process metrics and progress tracking.
  • Championed focused problem-solving process yielded sustained 13% cost reduction per year over 3 years resulting in $1.6M savings. Simplified the receiving, storage and delivery of sequenced parts yielding a 16% improved delivery quality metric.
• Managed multi shift production, maintenance and tool die room activities for an OEM Automotive component stamping facility producing major outer surface and structural stampings for 3 assembly plants.
  • Refined batch production operations planning maximizing press run time, increasing die maintenance availability, reducing floor space storage requirements and insourcing 9 tool and die sets to achieve best in class recognition.

Prior to consulting, Michael worked at General Motors and Amazon.  He held various roles in Engineering, Maintenance, Manufacturing and Package Delivery Operations with increasing responsibility assignments in maintenance, plant engineering, manufacturing engineering, material logistics and production operations.  During his career, Michael led multiple continuous improvement multi teams through successful vehicle launches across five assembly, four stamping and two fulfillment/delivery facilities.

Michael holds a Masters of Business Administration and Masters of Science in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from GMI Engineering and Management Institute (now Kettering University).