Jo-Anne Harris

Lean Consultant

As an expert Lean and Six Sigma Black Belt and industrial engineer with over 20 year’s experience, Jo-Anne has significant expertise in managing teams and projects across many sectors. An innovative, visionary, strategic, lateral thinker, Jo-Anne specializes in optimizing complex systems to transform organizations financially, operationally and culturally. Project highlights include:

• Streamlined the planning application process to reduce duplication of effort and make the process more efficient, resulting in increased application throughput in less time
• Spearheaded and executed the strategic roll-out of the continuous improvement vision for the City
• Orchestrated enterprise level integration of newly created business processes to instigate innovation for the organization
• Facilitated a large, cross-functional team to optimize complex, interdivisional and business-specific transformations, realizing results of up to 85% reduction in process time and savings of over $300,000 in one (1) year
• Led and executed concurrent process improvement projects across an organization, working closely to build partnerships with cross-functional teams and leaders to support the delivery of business outcomes – savings for the portfolio of projects exceeded $1 million
• Identified, defined and monitored key performance indicators (KPIs) for the consistent and standardized operation of 19 different sites, including change management strategies to ensure permanence
• Through respectful relationship management, rescued a distressed third-party vendor contract worth $15 million
• Redesigned financial processes, eliminating $120,000 of annual late fees
• Designed and implemented a methodology for calculating and understanding return on investment of continuous improvement projects and rolled this methodology out organization-wide (outcome and benefits evaluation)

Jo-Anne has a an MHSc, Masters of Health Administration a Bachelor of Applied Science, Industrial Engineering, Operational Research and System Management and a Professional Engineers of Ontario (P.Eng) designation.