PE
Operational Excellence Manager
Southland Industries

As Operational Excellence Manager for Southland Industries, Jessica Kelley uses her experience to grow and refine the organization’s Operational Excellence strategy in order to support lean thinking at the individual, project and organizational levels to achieve business objectives in Safety, Customer Experience, Employee Engagement and Financial Results.

Ms. Kelley started her career with Southland Industries designing and managing lifecycle solutions for large high tech, mission critical, healthcare, and biopharmaceutical clients. In this role, she was responsible for successfully delivering projects ranging upwards of $200 million dollars while maintaining budget, schedule, client relationships, and design requirements with a focus on value delivery and waste elimination. For a majority of her project management career, she focused on Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) projects.

Ms. Kelley moved on from project management to an internal role supporting and managing Southland’s ERP selection and implementation initiative by applying lean thinking and tools to internal organizational operations. Ms. Kelley then transitioned into the Director of Learning and Development role to scale the department as the company grew to more geographies and business lines for both increased impact to the individual and alignment with the company’s strategic objectives. In her current role, she builds on her experiences to support and develop lean thinking and process use both internally and as a partner to Southland’s external IPD project team members.

Ms. Kelley has been involved with the Lean Construction Institute (LCI), both nationally and at a local level in Northern California, since its inception. She served on the NorCal Community of Practice from 2007-2013, held the Core Group Leader role from 2008 through 2012, served as the 15th Annual LCI Congress Chair, was the LCI Education Advisory Board Chair from 2016-2018 and is now supporting the LCI National Practice Core Group.

Ms. Kelley contributed to the LCI Transforming Design and Construction manual and Target Value Delivery book and has been engaged by multiple clients for providing thought leadership on lean thinking in general and how trade/specialty contractor partners can contribute to the goals of a project. Ms. Kelley has also served on the AGC Training and Education Committee and CIRTN board. She continues to remain active in the LCI and lean construction communities and is an advocate for lean thinking.

Ms. Kelley received her bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering with a focus in mechanical from The Pennsylvania State University and is a licensed Professional Engineer in the State of California.

Lean Manager
DPR Construction

Cory Hackler has grown up around construction and building project his entire life. Growing up on a farm in Durango, CO, hard work was instilled at a young age. Cory moved to the bay area in early 2000 and after running his own business for 5 years Cory decided to give the General Contracting side a shot. He started off working for a small group in San Francisco called Venture Builders which allowed him time to wrap his head around the GC side of large construction projects.

Soon after he took an opportunity to go to work for Turner construction, while working on a large hospital project in the Bay Area he was first exposed to Lean and the Last Planner System which was a much better more collaborative way to run a construction project. While working for Turner he realized that his passion and ability to influence others in the industry on Lean Principals and ideas needed to be expanded upon.

He then took on more of a training role in the company presenting at a number of conferences such as p2sl, CMAA, transforming turner Portland and New York into lean enterprise and gaining himself Turner staff awards in 2009 and again in 2012. From there he took on a role to be a lead superintendent at a mega bay area project working for Skanska inc. On this project he developed a relationship with DPR and soon joined the company to focus on his passion and implementation of Lean.

Since taking on a role at DPR construction he with others has built a training program and published three papers at IGLC. Paper one: Building a Lean Culture, focuses on how the team changed the focus from a tools-based training approach to a people and leadership focus. Paper 2: Lean Leadership Training: Lessons from a Learner Centered Analysis, talks about the process of PDCA and using the voice of the customer to improve the training based on customer (student) feedback. And the final paper three: Building a Lean Culture: Engaging the Value Stream which discusses how the training has extended beyond the internal employees and is starting to influence the outside value streams that support construction projects.

Paper one was also chosen by the LCI as a grouping on 9 articles featured for a practitioners’ guide for essential lean research. He continues to build the program with goals to align the company first around development of management systems then followed up by Leadership systems such as Lean Leadership.

(Moderator)
Deputy Editor
Engineering News-Record

Tom Sawyer is a deputy editor at Engineering News-Record, a weekly print magazine and constant online news source for the U.S. and international construction industry. Tom is based in New York City and specializes in covering information technology advances that serve the construction industry.