Nick Piscitelli, Senior Consultant
Nicholas is a lean expert and operations leader with a passion for continuous improvement. His goal is to develop an overall systems approach that integrates process design, organization design and improvement design. His philosophy, developed over 28 years of experience in sales, engineering and operations, is that great leaders possess the vision to link business strategy to process design, an open heart to connect with their people through honest, direct communications and the grit to drive a disciplined, metrics-based improvement culture. He has deep international experience leading lean improvement initiatives across a variety of cultures and disciplines. This experience encompasses positions held as World Wide Director, Amazon Customer Excellence System, Global Continuous Improvement Director at Novelis, and European Region Account Manager at Alcoa. In these roles he had responsibility for integrating and advancing the lean programs.
Nicholas has driven breakthrough performance across a broad platform of industries ranging from industrial equipment manufacturing to eCommerce/Supply Chain. At Amazon he led the development of an overall operating system vision that combined Six Sigma and Lean. He also authored an inbound supply chain design to achieve rapid, small batch replenishment and oversaw the organization of an initiative to build this supply chain. At Novelis Nicholas introduced the vision of one lean/six sigma operating system to the CEO and Regional Vice Presidents. This work was supported by process improvements on critical constraints in Asia, Europe, North America and South America and the first ever system kaizen. At Alcoa Nicholas led breakthrough process improvements across a myriad of businesses and regions over the course of his 7 years on the global lean team. During this time he became recognized as a top lean leader and made major contributions to the development of world-class lean training programs. Demonstrating his hands on approach, he then took over operations leadership for a failing aerospace castings plant and played a major role in turning the business around. At Ingersoll-Rand Nicholas was a key member of the team that built the first lean model plant for the company. This plant was held up as the standard for driving breakthrough business performance using lean. His contributions were recognized by the company through enrollment into the Senior Leadership Development Program, sponsorship for an Executive MBA and promotion into engineering and production leadership roles.
Nicholas holds an Executive MBA from Duke University, a Masters of Engineering in Operations Research from Cornell University and a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo.