Implementing TWI: Creating and Managing a Skills-Based Culture

Featuring strategies employed in Lean, this volume describes the experiences of organizations using TWI more than 60 years after the Training Within Industry program turned the U.S. into the industrial giant that won World War II. Based on their experience implementing TWI in organizations as diverse as Virginia Mason Medical Center and Donnelly Manufacturing, Shingo Prize Winners Patrick Graupp and Robert Wrona prove why many consider them the most successful TWI trainers in the world.

Their hands-on manual provides the tools and templates that can turn your company’s employees into a skilled and invested workforce capable of realizing unprecedented profits.

About the Authors

Patrick Graupp began his training career at the SANYO Electric Corporate Training Center in Japan after graduating with highest honors from Drexel University in 1980. There he learned to deliver TWI and other training programs to prepare employees for assignment outside of Japan. He in turn was also transferred to a compact disc fabrication plant in Indiana, where he obtained manufacturing experience before returning to Japan to lead Sanyo's global training effort. Patrick earned an MBA from Boston University during this time, and he was later promoted to the head of human resources for SANYO North America Corp. in San Diego, where he settled.

Working with Bob Wrona, Patrick took vacation time in 2001 to deliver a pilot project for CNYTDO, the predecessor and parent company of the TWI Institute, to reintroduce TWI into the United States. The results encouraged Patrick to leave SANYO in 2002 to deliver and spread the TWI program as he was taught in Japan and which he described in his book The TWI Workbook: Essential Skills for Supervisors, a Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize Recipient for 2007. Since then he has developed hundreds of trainers who are now delivering TWI classes across the country and around the world.

Robert J. Wrona began his manufacturing career at Chevrolet in Buffalo, New York, where he was promoted to supervisor after earning his BS from Canisius College. He moved on to Kodak in Rochester, New York, where he became interested in organizational development while earning his MBA from Rochester Institute of Technology. Bob joined a high-volume retail drugstore chain in Syracuse, New York, when it was a twelve-store operation. He standardized store operating systems and procedures, developed internal training, and reorganized central distribution as the company profitably grew into a regional chain of 140 stores in eleven years.

Not content with becoming an administrator, Bob returned to manufacturing as an independent TQM consultant for small manufacturers to engage their people to improve performance. Fifteen years of hands-on implementation made it clear that supervisors lacked the skills to lead in the new world of Lean manufacturing. He discovered TWI when studying kaizen and tracked down TWI master trainer Patrick Graupp in 1998. The opportunity for them to reintroduce TWI in the United States came in 2001, when Bob became a Lean consultant for CNYTDO, Inc., which provided support for reintroducing TWI in Syracuse, New York, as detailed in his 2007 Shingo Prize-winning book The TWI Workbook: Essential Skills for Supervisors.