“When engaging an external expert, you always hope that you will find a perfect fit for your organization from a cultural and effectiveness perspective. The truth is Karen Martin is a rare find. She brought to our learning experience expertise and passion unparalleled by any consultant I have worked with past or present in my 28 year career. From the moment Karen stepped on site, I knew that she would deliver the intense, customized training to enable us to apply Lean principles and tools in our operations daily and, as importantly, capture significant improvements. Karen’s practical exercises and anecdotes made learning Lean an attainable objective. Karen has forever changed our operations from both a professional development and efficiency perspective for which I will always be grateful.”
Senior Vice President, Fortune 100 Financial Services Firm
“We will be continually grateful for the foundation you helped build for us and our Lean journey.”
Tracy Buchanan, Chief Executive Officer, CarePartners
“Karen Martin made all the difference for our business at a critical time. Due to changes in products and contracting processes we found ourselves buried in administrative complexity, with long contracting and customer set up times that were impacting our business. We hired Karen initially to lead a Kaizen event to improve our order and contracts processing time, and oh what a difference 3 days made! Karen is a dynamic leader and consultant. She has a keen ability to quickly assess and diagnose the problems in any organization. She is a high achiever and works tenaciously with her clients to drive high impact results. I highly recommend Karen Martin and Associates.”
Lauren Abrams, Senior Vice President, Customer Support Operations, Cardinal Health
“Karen Martin is the consultant and mentor that helped us launch our Lean journey, and we have been amazed with some of the lofty process improvements that have been achieved after less than two years of using Lean. Once ‘waste’ is clearly identified and resources can be reallocated to portions of the processes that do add value in the eyes of the customer, the passion for continual improvement becomes contagious.”
Chat Norvell, President & Chief Executive Officer, CarePartners
“While meeting with my staff, we came to the unanimous conclusion that you are the best presenter of Lean we have seen. Every word had meaning and your ability to explain things is exceptional.”
Rick Sunamoto, Director of Manufacturing, HM Electronics, San Diego, June 2009.
“Re: our Metrics-Based Process Mapping approach: “The biggest benefit to someone in the service industry, is that the metrics are easy to understand and easy to calculate. Our management and team leaders could actually get their arms around the data in order to understand the impact of improving on the current state summary metrics. We follow-up each Rapid Process Improvement event with monthly dashboards to track the progress made during the workshop. This would not be possible without a baseline from those metrics.”
Maureen Counsel, major health insurer
“I was so impacted by your book (The Kaizen Event Planner) that our department ordered 15 more. It has proved to be an invaluable tool for diagnosing where we are and where we need to be in a lean service environment.”
Maureen Counsel, major health insurer
“This was truly the best training I’ve ever received.”
“I am really tired of workshops that focus on theory and academic applications of Lean. This workshop was packed full of practical how-to’s and hands-on techniques that I can apply right away! I learned more in this workshop than I have in the past 6 months!”
ASQ Lean Six Sigma conference participant, Phoenix, Feb 2008
“Great dynamic speaker; only suggested change would be MORE!”
University of Wisconsin, Madison workshop participant, December 2007
“Great instructor, great real world experiences.”
IIE/ASQ Lean Six Sigma conference, Atlanta, September 2007
“Great workshop – well worth the investment!”
Client, August 2007
“One of the best sessions I have ever attended.”
HIMSS conference participant, San Diego, Feb 2006
Open popup“Excellent information that can be applied next week!”
HIMSS conference participant, San Diego, Feb 2006