Ryan Lawera is an FTE Consultant with over 7 years of manufacturing experience, culminating in an extensive background in program management with an emphasis on lean corporate development, production industrialization, and people systems. Areas of expertise include program management, process improvement, industrial and manufacturing engineering, and design and implementation of corporate Lean strategy.

Notable experience and accomplishments:

• Led divisional corporate strategic development and integration of lean within Continental. Deliverables include the creation of various training materials and training 2000+ employees, coaching and developing 20 corporate lean practitioners, supporting as lean project lead for 8 corporate improvement projects, and regaining lean corporate acceptance within the division.
• Drove a 6-month new product development triage project to regain customer confidence saving potential project losses of $500M, streamlining the path of critical information, and fostering once broken relationships.
• Assessed a Business Unit PLC red project reporting proposing improvements resulting in an increase of first-pass yield from 16% to 69% within 6 months.
• Directed in the consolidation and line balancing of 2 product lines for end-of-life production within 10 months, combining 8 assembly lines into 4 resulting in over 200 product variants and a complete redesign of material flow utilizing a lineside AS/RS.
• Implemented Industrial Engineering improvement initiative reducing IE design-related activities by 60% through work standardization becoming the global standard practice.
• Designed standard practice for product line industrialization from in-house build to customer location installation, reducing all rebuild time by 25%.

Prior to consulting, Ryan started his career at ABB Robotics as a manufacturing engineer followed by his time at Brose Group as a Customer Team Industrial Engineer (CTIE). As a CTIE, he led the design and procurement for product assembly lines while managing the respective product development for Daimler and BMW customers within the region. After joining Continental Automotive, he participated in an executive rotation program, acting as the Ford and GM Quality Manager of Projects for the ADAS group, and progressing into the Regional Lean Program Manager. During this time, Ryan helped lead the development and integration of Lean for the Automotive group.

Ryan attended school In Michigan at Oakland University and holds a degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering and has obtained certifications in Method Time Measurement (MTM) MTM-1 and MTM SD.