Connie is the Vice President of Business Excellence for Greenfield Global, a leading producer and supplier of high-value, mission-critical raw materials, ingredients, and additives that are vital to businesses and integral to a lower-carbon economy. Connie is responsible for creating and implementing long-term integrated business improvement and technology projects. She leads multiple teams that will collectively and collaboratively deliver an enterprise-wide transformation program. This includes enterprise software selection projects, multi-year ERP and other technology implementations, foundational projects, business optimization, and continuous improvement projects. As Vice President of Business Excellence Connie is accountable for developing and leading a center of excellence to provide advanced leadership, training and support for optimizing the business, resolving complex business issues and driving continuous improvement/ learning across the organization. Connie is a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) and holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Ottawa University. She has received a Black Belt certification in Lean.

Prof. Dr. Dimitris Kiritsis is Faculty Member at the Institute of Mechanical Engineering of the School of Engineering of EPFL, Switzerland, where he is leading a research group on ICT for Sustainable Manufacturing. He serves also as Director of the doctoral Program of EPFL on Robotics, Control and Intelligent Systems (EDRS). His research interests are Closed Loop Lifecycle Management, IoT, Semantic Technologies and Data Analytics for Engineering Applications. He served also as Guest Professor at the IMS Center of the University of Cincinnati, and Invited Professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne, the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard and at ParisTech ENSAM Paris. Prof. Kiritsis is actively involved in EU research programs in the area of Factories of the Future and Enabling ICT for Sustainable Manufacturing. He has more than 220 publications. From September 2013 to September 2019 Dimitris was Chair of IFIP WG5.7 – Advanced Production Management Systems. From 2013 to 2017 he was member of the Advisory Group of the European Council on Leadership on Enabling Industrial Technologies – AG LEIT-NMBP. He is also founding fellow member of the International Society for Engineering Asset Management (ISEAM), of various international scientific communities in his area of interests including EFFRA and among the initiators of the IOF (Industrial Ontologies Foundry).

Results-driven and strategic leader who develops and aligns key business initiatives with more than 25 years of experience in manufacturing and quality systems from plastics, steel and other industries. Heinz holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Universidad Autonoma de Mexico, a certificate in project management from University of British Columbia and a master’s degree in organizational psychology from Adler University. He currently works for Primex Technologies as VP of Manufacturing, where he seeks advice and insight from his team members on how as a team, they can best drive growth. Heinz was a speaker at “Advantage through Excellence” by Excellence in Manufacturing Consortium (EMC) in Toronto last year and collaborated this year with the University of Waterloo with an interview for their operations and supply chain management graduate studies.

Jerry Hamilton is a Procurement Engineer at Lockheed Martin. Jerry works with a team of engineers to employ the use of Lean Six Sigma and statistical tools/methods to production processes within the supply chain. He has worked in the semiconductor, transportation and aerospace industries and is certified through the American Society for Quality (ASQ) as a Six Sigma Master Black Belt. He holds a Master of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Houston and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from New Mexico State University.

Paul is Chief Digital Officer within the division of GKN with a team of 70 people globally. His biggest career success is the development of the industry 4.0 strategy for his division which he has been an integral part of. Paul believes the biggest opportunity for the manufacturing industry is data. To date, manufacturers have focused on product, machine and assets which is the core of the business and allows access to data sources. Now it is vital companies make the data visible and transparent, finding the value and resulting in improvements and new business models, new service models – what everybody needs to succeed in Industry 4.0 and a create new realm for manufacturing.