QMI Team: Louis Stephenson
Visual Machine® Director
Louis Stephenson is the Director of the Visual Machine® Curriculum at QMI/Visual-Lean Institute (QMI).
As such, Louis is responsible for overseeing QMI’s suite of Visual Machine methodologies and for assisting clients with their Visual Machine implementations, deploying such QMI methods as Visual Machine®, Machine Lubrication/Visual & Effective, and Rapid Machine Changeover. Louis is also conversant in OEE and other TPM methods. Periodically, Louis teams with Dr. Galsworth on visual implementation conversions.
Prior to QMI, Louis was Continuous Improvement Manager at La-Z-Boy, a $100 million furniture manufacturing plant in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, where he was responsible for all continuous improvement initiatives and plant maintenance and engineering functions. As a result of his leadership of a plant-wide conversion to cellular manufacturing, unit production time was reduced from more than seven days to less than one day.
As Focused Factory Manager at Gates Rubber Company, one of the world's largest manufacturers of industrial and automotive belts and hoses, Louis also implemented an in-house Kaizen improvement process that made improvement a way of life at Gates. Successfully driving lean conversion while greatly improving financial metrics and on-time deliveries, Louis’s facility won the coveted Shingo Prize for Manufacturing Excellence.
Louis also founded LGS Consulting Inc., providing Lean training and implementation to manufacturers. Louis has helped companies in a wide range of industries to improve their business processes and their production systems—heavy equipment, MTO electronics, furniture, electronic guidance systems, machining/stamping, OEM automotive, rubber, plastic injection, roto mold, light assembly, fabrication, paint/custom paint, and woodworking. Louis assisted clients throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico to identify interventions to address their business and operational problems.
Louis has been trained and certified as a Lean Manufacturing Trainer by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and has served nearly a decade as a Shingo Prize Examiner. A lover of beaches and F1 Racing, Louis is also a gourmet chef and loves to cook almost as much he loves to eat.