Jo-An Weddle has over 20 years both as a small business owner and service provider for small businesses. Together with the business, she works to reduce cost and improve the company's competitive advantage. As part of the Enterprise Excellence effort, Jo-An has worked with dozens of local manufacturers to transform their companies through the "Journey to Excellence". These companies have achieved some notable improvements. They include: · Reduced cost of goods sold by 42 percent, · Reduced work-in-process inventories from $89,000 to $11,000 per month, · Improved first run yield 17 percent · Increased sales 12 fold.
Jo-An's specialties include strategic planning, development and facilitation of self-directed work teams, linking measurement and reward systems to critical success factors, process redesign, quality system design and implementation, lean manufacturing and change management.
Jo-An has been associated with the American Society for Quality since 1993 and has acted as facilities liaison with the Fort Worth Section, hosting the meetings at the Automation & Robotics Research Institute since that time.
Jo-An has been a standing member of the Garland Performance Excellence Council since 1998, working with local companies to bring a local quality award program modeled on the Texas Award for Performance Excellence.
In 1996, Jo-An received the prestigious "Model of Excellence Award" from the U. S. Congress for helping small companies get "Small Business Innovative Research" grants.
In 1998, Jo-An became a Certified Texas Quality Award Examiner and was recognized by the Texas Manufacturing Assistance Center with an Innovation Award for her work in supply-chain optimization.
Jo-An earned a Master of Business Administration from the University of Texas at Arlington and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Texas A & M University at Commerce.
Contact:
jweddle@arri.uta.edu |
