MENU Lean Six Sigma
Practice Leader – Steve Wall
Steve Wall is the Public Sector Performance Improvement Practice Leader for Orion Development Group. He has more than 25 years of experience leading major improvement efforts.
As a consultant, Mr. Wall has worked with dozens of states, counties and private sector organizations in the United States and Mexico to develop strategic plans, implement change, improve customer focus, eliminate waste and save money.
In 1993, Mr. Wall was the first in the nation to be appointed to a cabinet-level postion to direct quality improvements efforts throughout a state government. Mr. Wall was the founding director of LeanOhio. Over his career Steve has worked with thousands of people in directing programs that saved taxpayers more than $700 million.
A nationally recognized expert on how to cut red tape, Mr. Wall has testified before subcommittees of the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Secretary of Labor’s Office. He has served as a keynote speaker for numerous state and nation conferences and instructed workshops and seminars for more than a dozen colleges and universities. Mr. Wall is a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt.
Practice Leader – Joe Brancaccio
Joe Brancaccio is a Process Management Consultant for Orion Development Group. He has more than 20 years of experience in process management, strategic planning, organizational effectiveness, and leadership.
Mr. Brancaccio has worked with many Fortune 500 companies and assisted the States of Texas and Oklahoma with their quality improvement strategies. He was directly involved with the ‘Leadership Through Quality’ strategy at Xerox Corporation and assisted with the winning of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.
As an instructor, Mr. Brancaccio has a friendly yet passionate and motivational style of presentation people enjoy. Joe Brancaccio graduated with honors from the U.S. Military School in Fort Knox, Kentucky and is a Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin.
Practice Leader – Ralph Smith
Ralph Smith is Vice President, Healthcare and Strategic Services for Orion Development Group. He has personally supervised the performance improvement efforts in more than 100 organizations worldwide, including hospitals, clinics and other healthcare organizations.
Over the past 20 years, Mr. Smith has helped hospitals increase efficiency and quality of care by adapting and applying contemporary process improvement techniques. For example, in the 1990’s Ralph taught Continuous Quality Improvement techniques to a team of internal facilitators at Evangelical Community Hospital in Pennsylvania. In the early 2000’s, he helped the quality improvement teams at Texas Children’s Hospital achieve dramatic gains in efficiency. Currently, Mr. Smith is leveraging Lean Management techniques to enable both Children’s Medical Center of Dallas and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) to increase revenue via better utilization of resources. Other healthcare and healthcare-related clients Ralph has served include the Cobb County Board of Health, Memorial Blood Center of Minnesota, BlueCross BlueShield of Illinois, Fairfax County Health Department and the VA Medical Center.
Mr. Smith is intimately familiar with strategic planning. He is a recognized expert in this discipline and author of the highly rated text Business Process Management and the Balanced Scorecard. Ralph is uniquely qualified to help hospitals align process improvement efforts with the organization’s long-term strategy.
Mr. Smith is also a respected professional development instructor. He has taught hundreds of professional development seminars for universities across the United States. He teaches healthcare process improvement for the University of Colorado College of Nursing, Michigan State University and the University of Delaware. His ability to transfer skills and knowledge to healthcare staff is a critical asset. Orion’s clients achieve self-sufficiency because Ralph and his team “teach your staff to fish.”
Mr. Smith has a Masters degree in Operations Research from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Bachelors degree in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Georgia.
Practice Leader – Joe Cirafesi
Joe Cirafesi is a Process Management consultant and instructor for Orion Development Group. Prior to joining Orion, Joe Cirafesi spent more than 20 years at Air Products and Chemicals where he has helped the company evolve to an internationally recognized benchmark for excellence in cross-functional process management.
Joe Cirafesi teaches seminars for Orion’s corporate clients and university partners, including Process Mapping, Emerging Role of the Process Manager and Process Value Analysis. His extensive experience at Air Products enables Joseph Cirafesi to leverage first-hand knowledge of unparalleled process management success in the classroom.
As a Human Resources Manager, Joe Cirafesi helped lead major changes to the organizational structure and leadership teams from 1995 to 1997. As a Business Manager/Process Owner, Joe Cirafesi was responsible for the ongoing management of the product development, innovation, bidding, customer engagement, engineering construction and start-up work processes. As a European Region Director, Joe Cirafesi organized training and application of continuous improvement tools in 11 countries. These efforts improved profitability by 5% to 20% in various units.
Joe Cirafesi is a Certified Management Accountant who received his BA in genetics from Cornell University and an MBA from the Smeal College of Business at Penn State.
Let Orion help you overcome today’s healthcare business challenges.
Call Margaret Powers today at (800) 510-2117.