Many thanks to my new friends in Australia

Tomorrow morning my wife and I will begin our long journey back to the United States from Australia.  I must say that our time spent in this wonderful country was full of fun times.  On May 22nd we arrived in Melbourne where I spoke at the National Manufacturer's Week conference and made lots of new friends.  From what I was told, the overflow audience was the largest of the week.  And then the following week I delivered two, 1-day workshops and again the response was very good.  The first day was for customers and the second day was for potential customers (i.e. prospects).  I then flew to Sydney and delivered two more workshops and again, both were received quite well.

My hat is off to the company that had me come to Australia, ECi Solutions.  They are an ERP software developer and judging from the comments received in both Melbourne and Sydney, ECi Solutions is a highly respected company.  The reason my hat is off to this company is that in all of my years, I have never been approached by a company to teach their customers (and prospects) how to become more profitable.

In all of my sessions, I presented my method for combining Lean and Six Sigma with the Theory of Constraints and I must say that judging the comments I received, each and every attendee thoroughly enjoyed what I had to say.  They all walked away with a new tool kit, so to speak.  The most popular individual tool of all was the Goal Tree, but Goldratt's 5 Focusing Steps was the best new concept they have heard about in years.  They were able to see right away why their LSS initiatives could be enhanced.  Another popular concept was Throughput Accounting as was the TOC Replenishment Model.

I want to thank all of my new friends for the amazing hospitality shown to not only me, but to my wife as well.  We both enjoyed our time in Australia immensely and would welcome the opportunity to return.  Having said this, my wife has made it very clear to me that if we are to return to Australia, we will first have to spend several night in Hawaii, just to break up the plane time into more eatable chunks.  Coming to Australia we spent roughly 22 hours in the planes while returning to the US we will spend about 21.5 hours.  I guess I can see her point.
Bob Sproull