Host Company:
Danner is known in the industry for its high quality, rugged footwear, which is a result of their strong commitment to customer value. This commitment is deeply rooted in their approach to engaging and inspiring employees to actively participate in continuous improvement.
Tour Summary:
At Danner one of their goals is to drive down the cost of manufacturing and boost efficiency, so they identified a need to have a clear process for understanding staffing and machine needs, product flow, bottlenecks, and sources of quality problems. This provided a standardized way to build a case for automation through an ROI analysis.
Learn about how Ashton integrated these key techniques into her ROI and listen to the unique way she built this into a “story arc” to sell the benefits of automation.
- Product, Quantity & Routing (PQRs) for staffing and machine needs
- Spaghetti diagrams to visualize cell flow
- Data-driven waste and quality investigation using Power BI
- Current state analysis for automation justification
- Team adoption and engagement studies
Come hear their approach to justify continuous improvement using automation, then go to the Gemba to see their decisions in action.
Who should attend? CI professionals, manufacturing engineers, project managers, manufacturing leaders. Anyone curious about best practices for justifying automation in addition to seeing other lean principles in action throughout their factory.
Date: Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Time: 8am – 11:45am
Location: 18201 NE Portal Way, Portland, OR 97230 (Map link)
Registration: Email jennifer@nwhpec.com, include name, email, job title for all participants. Initially limited to two attendees per company.
Cost: no cost (available to NWHPEC members only)