Craig Tickel
Executive Consultant

Select Project Experience:

A Chemical Firm in Memphis needed to increase its plant reliability. Craig worked with the team to measure and categorize downtime events, then aided them in developing solutions to increase the mean time between failures. The result was two percent increased uptime per month.

Working with BP in their call center, Craig developed a dashboard to aid them in measuring their call center performance, then using the data, helped them organize improvement teams to focus on the largest improvement opportunities.

Gee and Jenson, an engineering firm located in Florida, had a local office which had a number projects that were significantly over budget and cost. Craig worked with the team to develop organize their project work and measure performance at designated intervals thereby reducing rework and the percent budget utilized by over twenty percent. The result was increasing profits of over a million per year.

At Stepan, Craig worked with plant management to reduce cycle times in a sold-out reactor increasing throughput by 200,000 lbs per month resulting in increased revenue of more than 1 million dollars. He lead the effort to establish an organized system of process control documents, including flow charts, cause & effect diagrams, FMEA, and a control plan for each production process. He developed a system of calculating and presenting process capability data in order to focus improvement efforts on the key products. These "problem products" served as a focus for the respective process areas. He aided in the development of a process to reduce measurement variation from plant to plant – thereby increasing the consistency of the delivered product to Stepan's Fortune 500 customers. Craig developed and implemented a database for tracking savings for the corporation. Stepan's yearly improvement savings average 15 million per year during his tenure.

Starwood Hotels and Resorts wanted to launch a worldwide Lean Six Sigma initiative to improve margins and gain market share. In the course of the initiative roll-out, Elisabeth trained and coached project leaders within a union environment, leading to project benefits averaging $30 million per year from 2004 through 2008 for North America alone. Elisabeth also assisted in the design and implementation of a project-transfer and process management initiative that helped to expand gains from best practice projects to all 700 properties.