Joan Adams has been a Senior Consultant to manufacturing companies for over 30 years. She brings measurable and sustainable improvements in operations, quality, customer service and retention. Joan has worked extensively with pharmaceutical and food companies throughout her career. She strives to bring Lean principles and techniques to the strategy side of business as well, helping client companies fully leverage their operational excellence as a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

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Prior to joining The ProAction Group, Joan consulted with the French National Utility – EdF, and ATKearney.  She then started her own consultancy where she provides Lean expertise to manufacturing, administration, warehousing, distribution, and pharmaceuticals.  

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In her work with Big Pharma, Joan helped companies significantly reduce their development and approvals times and streamline machine and testing validation processes. She implemented processes that significantly improved consistency of international labels for multiple countries. Joan created a hard deadline calendar for Internal approvals, reducing cycle times by nearly half – greatly improving the company hitting FDA deadlines. By implementing strict approval processes, hard deadline calendars, introducing consistent multi-country labels, and speeding up the internal validation process, the company submissions to the FDA were more timely, accurate, and efficient.

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With Joan’s diverse background she has honed her skills in standardization, training, and organization to drive efficiency and FDA compliance. She has ensured FDA compliance and safety by translating training materials into Spanish, scheduling cleaning during non-production times, and organizing the floor using 5S methodology. She has set standard machine ranges and trained operators, significantly reducing scrap, implemented machine maintenance tracking systems that prioritized repairs, reducing downtime, and balanced production through strategic dough freezing during slow periods.

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Joan is a fully certified Lean trainer, implementer, and facilitator. Joan writes monthly business columns on Lean for two trade magazines.  She is also a professor in operations two business schools in the NYC area. Joan received her BS in engineering from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, her Diplôme Ingénierie from Ecole Centrale – Paris, her SM in engineering from MIT, and her MBA in operations from the Wharton School of Business.