Featured Presenters

Curtis Burnett

Manager – manufacturing engineering, Deere & Co.

Curtis Burnett has 29 years of experience with Deere & Co. and is currently its manager of manufacturing engineering. His history at Deere includes experience in all three manufacturing divisions: agriculture, construction and forestry (C&F), and commercial and consumer products (CCE). In C&F, he led the Six Sigma implementation and process managed business team. He also gained experience in marketing as division manager, sales and service. In CCE, he led the "Build to Demand" asset reduction initiative and launched the implementation of the Deere Production Systems. As director of quality for CCE, Burnett revitalized quality engineering and implemented a very successful returns and allowances reduction program.

Most recently, as operations manager, he implemented lean manufacturing for a joint-venture transmission factory in South Carolina. Before joining Deere, Burnett was a co-op with Kraft Foods.

John Crutchfield

Senior manager – Industrial Engineering, The Boeing Co.

John Crutchfield leads the industrial engineering team at Boeing’s St. Louis facility, a position he has held since 1999. In that time, the role of industrial engineers has expanded to include implementation of lean principles, with applications in manufacturing as well as engineering and business processes. Under Crutchfield’s leadership, the team has been a primary force in transformation of Boeing’s St. Louis and St. Charles facilities to a lean production system modeled after that of Toyota. In January 2008, he was selected to lead the operations-sponsored Industrial Engineering Process Action Team in development of enterprise common processes and systems for the industrial engineering function.

Crutchfield holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Missouri-Columbia and an M.S. in engineering management from the University of Missouri-Rolla. Prior to joining Boeing, he worked for McDonnell Douglas in structural design, working on the F/A-18C/D and several proprietary programs. He also was the principal investigator on IRAD and CRAD efforts focused on dimensional management and other methods to improve production of airframe assemblies.

David Poirier

CEO, The Poirier Group Ltd.

David Poirier is a seasoned executive with an aptitude for effecting significant change in the areas of corporate strategy, operations, logistics and technology. Combining engineering and process disciplines, he has successfully exercised effective IE solutions amid a variety of challenging cultural environments that opposed change. For more than 25 years, he held increasingly senior roles in retail and healthcare. Poirier is currently the CEO of The Poirier Group Ltd., a high-energy, senior advisory firm based in Ontario that focuses on working with private equity as well as public and private corporations to transform businesses or functions through difficult challenges in strategy, planning deployment and execution of initiatives and operations.

D. Scott Sink, Ph.D., P.E.

Lean Sigma Certification Program Director – Integrated Systems Engineering, The Ohio State University

Scott Sink leads the lean sigma certification program in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering at The Ohio State University. The program’s 53 projects have generated nearly $4 million in direct benefits to local business and industry, including The Limited, Kroger and OSU Medical Center. Sink’s former academic posts include serving on the faculty at Oklahoma State University and Virginia Tech. He also held positions in the private sector as vice president of business process reengineering for Exchange Solutions and vice president of business process improvement for MDS International. Sink, the author of three books, is a past president of IIE, the World Academy of Productivity Sciences, and the World Confederation of Productivity Sciences, where he remains a board member. He holds a B.S. in industrial and systems engineering, an M.S. in industrial and systems engineering, and a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary studies, all from Ohio State.