Profile of Founder - Robert Oh

Robert is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Eagles Wings. He is also responsible for the Asia Pacific business and operations of Duggan and Associates Inc a reputed lean firm based in US. He has had 25 years of experience and has held various leadership positions within the Logistics, Infocomm Services, Military and Government sectors. Along with his lean experience in the industrial sectors, he also specializes in applying lean to service industries and business processes in the office. He acquired his knowledge of business process management and lean methods/techniques from many years of association with productivity improvement efforts aimed at the organization level and also at the national level.

In 1987 he led a task force to study opportunities for nation-wide implementation of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to explore how JIT concepts could be applied between businesses and Singapore government agencies as well as between private sector companies. This led to him joining Singapore Network Services (SNS) which built and operated the world’s first EDI trade documentation clearance system involving all air, land and sea links. This world re-known system aggressively targeted the reduction of paperwork and waste associated with import and export documentation and clearance.

As the Vice President for Customer Service and Support (CS&S) for Asia Pacific and Japan region, while in a multi-national corporation, he was given the opportunity to lead over a 4 year period, an ambitious world-wide performance improvement project code-named Operations BREEZE. This was one of the world’s first global implementation of lean in a services area and was aimed primarily to drive customer service levels to "Best in Class" standards.

This involved the simultaneous implementation of lean across more than 20 locations around the globe. The backlog of worldwide technical requests eventually fell by as much as 75% from the starting level of 10,000 worldwide. The turn-around time to process technical requests was cut to a quarter of what it was before. What used to take more than 40 days before a solution was delivered to a customer, now took only 10. Customer reference-ability in Asia Pacific grew to unprecedented levels where 90% of customers were willing to act as prospect references.

Robert has provided lean consulting and education services to clients from various sectors including health-care, manufacturing, aerospace, financial services, education, infocomm, air travel and public sectors, to help them improve their processes and organizational performance His engagements have brought him to the US, Europe and Asia Pacific. His lean process improvement experience extends from areas as diverse as customer service to software maintenance, air travel catering services, supply chain, manufacturing as well as to aircraft overhaul and repair in both production areas and the supporting business processes.

He holds an MBA from Henley Management College and a graduate diploma in Business Administration from the Singapore Institute of Management. His first degree was in Electrical Engineering from the National University of Singapore. As a Thought Leader on the subject of lean in the Asia Pacific region he speaks at conferences and contributes his ideas, views and concerns to business and technical publications. He is a consultant, educator, practitioner and researcher of lean management. It is his hope that enlightened organizations in the region and across the globe will leverage lean to its fullest potential to keep ahead of the growing competition around them.