Breakout Sessions - SWOT Summit. Online registration by Cvent

This is an unconference, not a keynote — the agenda comes from the room, not the stage. Facilitators from Phillips & Co (Chicago), who lead this summit's roundtable sessions, open by asking attendees to vote live on the innovation and strategy topics they most want to dig into, surfacing the biggest challenges on people's minds before the day even gets moving. From there, the room breaks into 15-20 facilitated roundtables, deliberately mixing people who wouldn't otherwise end up at the same table, for focused conversation on whatever topics the group just chose. Each table closes with a fast five-minute share on an innovative practice, turning one room into dozens of concurrent conversations and sending everyone into the rest of the summit already thinking, already connected to people outside their usual circle. It's a deliberately engaged, participatory way to start the day — surfacing what's actually top of mind instead of guessing at it from a stage.

Most teams don't stay reactive because they lack process-improvement tools — they stay reactive because of what leadership funds, rewards, and models. This roundtable, facilitated by Phillips & Co (Chicago), is built for executives and senior leaders to work through the questions that sit specifically at that level: where is your team's time and budget actually allocated versus where you say improvement matters, what behavior gets rewarded when someone stops to fix a root cause instead of just clearing the backlog, and where does leadership's own behavior still reward the reactive fire drill over the proactive fix. Come ready to be candid about what's happening in your own organization — this is a room for leaders comparing notes on what's within their control, not a session on improvement methodology.

Expanding a manufacturing footprint touches more decisions than most leadership teams plan for — where to locate, how to engineer the site, what to build, and how to make the finished facility actually perform. This panel follows that full arc through four practitioners who each own a different stage of it: Tom Witty (Strategic Relocation Services) on site selection and incentive strategy, Darron Ammann (Bartlett & West) on civil engineering and site development, Brian Jones (PARIC) on design-build construction, and Steve Holland (McEnery Automation) on automating the finished facility for productivity. For executives and decision-makers weighing a move, an expansion, or a new build, this session offers a realistic, sequenced look at what the journey actually requires — and where companies most often stumble.

In this fast-paced interactive session, we will craft detailed financial projections in real time, “crowdsourcing” estimates for sales, profit margins, labor, operating expenses and more for an example business. The projections will then provide pro forma P/Ls, balance sheets, cash flow statements and financial ratios – all the data a lender or investor would need to see – and all in less than an hour! Participants will gain an understanding of the metrics by which their projections are judged and will have the example projections and a resource for the blank sheets and “how to use” videos.”

HR in a manufacturing environment runs into problems a generic HR roundtable doesn't touch: multi-shift scheduling and coverage gaps, onboarding and safety training that has to move as fast as the line does, absenteeism tracking across shifts, and paperwork that still bounces between HR and the plant floor instead of living in one system. This roundtable, facilitated by Phillips & Co (Chicago), is built for HR professionals working inside manufacturing operations specifically — bring the workflow that's actually costing your team time, and leave with a short list of concrete changes other manufacturing HR leaders have made to simplify it.