ReducedEffort® Changeover (PDF)

Ron Heiskell has a BS in mechanical engineering and an MBA in technology management. A knowledgeable advocate and practitioner of Lean principles, Ron first developed and tested the Lean-driven process that evolved into the ReducedEffort system at The Clorox Company, where he was an engineer for 24 years.

During his first 22 years at The Clorox Company, Ron worked in the Machine Development Group, designing and building packaging machines and lines. During that time, he began teaching a class on product innovation at two California universities. As part of this class, he taught the role that paradigms play in people resisting new ideas. He also discovered a way to shift a person's paradigm very quickly.

When Ron was asked to teach SMED at The Clorox Company manufacturing plants, he agreed-in part because he saw it as his chance to try some new techniques. He knew that line workers had their own ways of performing changeovers and that many of them had been doing it the same way for a long time, often for 25 or more years. Their paradigms were well established. The challenge was to get them to readily shift paradigms and try something different. Teaching SMED at The Clorox Company gave Ron the opportunity to try this new reduced-effort process in the real world. The results were so amazing that his job shifted from designing packaging lines to reducing changeover downtime in all the plants owned by The Clorox Company as well as those of its suppliers.

After leaving The Clorox Company, Ron founded ReducedEffort, LLC., a company devoted to reducing changeover downtime. Since that time, he has been conducting ReducedEffort Kaizen Events at Fortune 500 companies throughout the United States and Canada.

Ron has received over fifty U.S. and foreign patents. He is the recipient of the AmeriStar Award from the Institute of Packaging Professionals, the Technology of the Year Award from Packaging Technology & Engineering Magazine, and the Dupont Award for Innovation.