Ricardo Mejia, Senior Consultant

Ricardo is an Industrial Engineer, MBA from the University of Notre Dame, Lean Champion and Six Sigma Black Belt with more than 30 years of experience in Operations, including 27+ years in Lean and 18+ years in Quality. His main focus most of these years has been on leading Continuous Improvement initiatives at Emerson and Copeland, where he recently retired as Vice President of Quality for their Electronics and Controls Business Unit.

He has facilitated more than 100 kaizen events throughout his career in Brazil, Mexico, US, Canada, France, Romania, India, China and Thailand. He’s a hands-on expert in Lean Enterprise principles (Lean Manufacturing and Lean Office) as well as Six Sigma and Quality in general. He’s a strong proponent of building a strong Lean culture through Kaizen, starting with a business gap analysis, Value Stream Mapping and then Kaizen events focused on addressing VSM gaps.

Ricardo’s first Kaizen event in 2001 focused on re-designing the layout of a Mexican facility to improve productivity without adding building space. By introducing a U-shape cell design, the Lean team led by Ricardo was able to improve space productivity by 50% and output productivity by 90%. Since that initial success, his mission was to share those best practices with other similar locations in the US, Thailand and China.

In 2004, Ricardo helped introduce Strategy Deployment to Emerson and since then, he has been applying its framework and teaching Executives and employees how to use it effectively.

Throughout his career, he has led many Continuous Improvement initiatives to improve Quality, Speed and reduce Costs that have driven significant overall performance. In 2020, he introduced a very simple and effective Risk Assessment and Preventive Action process which drove major Customer incidents from 21 to 1. Other results obtained are 69% reduction is assembly Lead Time, 20% improvement in Customer On-Time Delivery, 43% overall improvement in productivity, 33% improvement in RIP turns, 86% reduction in Customer PPM, and 37% reduction in Cost of Quality.

In 2025, Ricardo decided to become a Lean and Quality Advisor, in order to help more businesses become successful in their Lean Journey by sharing his extensive experience and transferring it to future generations of Continuous Improvement leaders.

Achievements

• The successful Lean implementation in Hermetic Motors (Emerson) led to a Chairman’s Award in 2005 for the BU and a 2010 President’s Award for the Mexican Plant where his Lean journey started.
• In 2011, Ricardo was promoted to Vice President of Performance Excellence and transferred to the Appleton Group (Emerson) in Chicago, where he trained key personnel of 12 facilities in 6 countries and led significant improvements in Quality, Delivery and Cost.
• In 2015, he was promoted again at Appleton where he took over Quality as well as Performance Excellence responsibility. Through preventive actions, he drove Cost of Quality and Customer PPM down significantly.
• In 2017, Ricardo was transferred to White-Rodgers (Emerson) to oversee Quality. That’s where he introduced the risk assessment process that almost eliminated major customer quality incidents in that business. He also personally trained more than 30 suppliers in Structured Problem Solving, which drove Supplier Quality incident rate down by 61%
• In 2023, his duties doubled and he became responsible for the Quality of a newly merged business unit with sales over $800M/year.