Melissa Woessner and Bill Waddell

Wahl Clipper is growing market share, sales and profits as the only remaining US manufacturer in their highly competitive segment of consumer products. Wahl’s lean journey is leading the company to an even higher level of success on the strength of the deployment of a fully integrated lean management approach, anchored by lean accounting. Melissa Woessner, Wahl Clipper’s Controller, will describe the original lean accounting concept developed by Wahl, the implementation mode, results, lessons learned, the SOFP (Sales & Operations Financial Planning) process she spearheads at Wahl, and plans for the future evolution of financial management at Wahl.

Bill Waddell, former consultant, Lean Accounting Summit presenter, author of Rebirth of American Industry and now Wahl’s Vice President of Manufacturing, will describe Wahl’s value stream based organizational structure, operations performance metrics, Wahl’s extensive employee driven kaizen process, and the radical scaling back of Wahl’s reliance on MRP systems.

Wahl Clipper is a 90 year old, family owned company, with approximately 700 employees at their Sterling, Illinois manufacturing and headquarters location, and another 2,000 employees around the world, selling in 165 countries, with manufacturing operations in Europe and Asia.