I hope you are having a great start to the New Year!!!

 EMC is looking to have another great year in the GTA…one of our priorities is to strengthen our GTA Consortium in order to better benefit the manufacturers in the GTA.  Together with our community partners,  City of Vaughan, Town of Richmond Hill and fellow EMC Members, Excellence in Manufacturing Consortium (EMC) is presenting a special business briefing for area manufacturers.  We have targeted this February as an opportunity to provide a Business Briefing for all the manufacturers in the GTA.  This is a special event that will be held at Canadian Linen and Uniform Services.  Please see below for a brief description on what this no cost event is about. 

http://www.richmondhillonline.com/Business_Information/news_special.asp

http://www.city.vaughan.on.ca/index.php?option=com_jcalpro&Itemid=25&extmode=view&extid=382

 The "Special GTA EMC Business Briefing" scheduled for February 23^rd is a high impact event, below is a brief agenda of activities and special guest speakers that we will be talking at this event.

 The first part of the session will cover; Increasing Manufacturing Competitiveness; Al Diggins, President of EMC will be leading this discussion

 In this session, the attendees will learn how leveraging the expertise and experience that already exists within their local manufacturing community can help them improve. Through peer to peer networking with other manufacturers regardless of size or sector - that advantage increases. They will gain access to additional world-class best practices, they can become more globally competitive and will be better able to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

 The second part of the session will touch on;  Manufacturing in Today's Harsh Climate  Our Guest Speaker, Chad Metcalf, President, Value Stream Solutions

 Change is around us continually - and developing a corporate culture and mindset to deal with the challenges that change brings can help strengthen your company - moving your business closer to a world class organization!

Our Guest Speaker, Chad Metcalf, President, Value Stream Solutions, will discuss several pertinent topics:

• Culture & the ability to get things done,

• Vision/Values/Roles/Enablers/Measures

• Identifying resistance, having a plan, staying the course

• Working through change to get results

• Building a sustainable process for continuous improvement

• Standard work, problem solving, improving, measuring, and adjusting

One of our goals with this event is to support the opportunities there are in benchmarking throughout the GTA. This not only strengthens the Consortium but it will allow members more of an opportunity to meet other local manufacturers, get into their plants and learn from their best practices. The stronger the Consortium the more benefit each manufacturer gets from peer to peer networking.

 Our other goal is to provide our present membership base in the area with a value added session detailing some tools they can use in their own facilities hence the discussion on "Manufacturing in Today's Harsh Climate". As you can see by the points listed above it is great topic for discussion.

 If you have any other questions or concerns please feel free to let me know.  I am really looking forward to getting together and discussing how we can help local manufacturers in the GTA!

I look forward to hearing from you!

 Cheers,

Kevin.