Clay Wilker
Clay has 34 years of manufacturing experience in the Automotive and Aerospace Industries. He was involved the dramatic growth of the Automotive Safety Airbag growth for 15 years at Autoliv, the World Leader in automotive safety restraints. Clay has served in various Operational and Program Management roles at ATK/Northrop Grumman since 2005. His most current roles are as a Solution Owner for the Northrop Grumman Enterprise Factories of the Future digital solutions portfolio across the Corporation’s manufacturing operations. Clay was also selected to serve on the Northrop Grumman Enterprise Lean Agile Steering Committee
Clay serves as a Lead Examiner for the Shingo Institute, where for 29 years he leads a team of highly competent lean experts, in the evaluation of Global World Class Companies, against the Shingo Prize criteria for Excellence in Lean manufacturing.
Clay Graduated from Utah State University (USU) with a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace and an MBA from the USU Huntsman School of Business, where he is frequently invited to lecture on manufacturing leadership philosophies and experiences.
Leadership Influence: Clay has a unique skill set, and the vision and drive the ROI. From a top-down perspective, he understands the goals of the executive team and the P &L impact from decisions on digital transformation. More importantly he is able to bridge the gap between the executives and the plant workers getting them to buy-in on specific initiatives with full adoption and smooth change management.
Operational Impact: From his days at Autoliv, Clay learned the importance of continuous improvement and change management. He believes that you can always improve the factory, no matter what stage, the goal is to always improve operational efficiency. He was the driving force behind the implementation of the Shop Floor Performance Management solution at Northrop Grumman. A digital tool and process, focused on optimizing time and effort to expose problems with facts and data that are constraining existing factory capacity.
Impact on Company/Institution: For the last 18+ years Clay has been an influential figure at Northrop Grumman in manufacturing. He has taken his division from a paper system with disconnected machines and has been driving force to build a connectivity network of machine and implements a performance management solution to build an Infrastructure of modernization and digitization for multiple factories. As an operations leader, he worked very closely with Northrop Digital Transformation Office. Due to his efforts, he recently received a promotion to lead the Shop Floor Performance Management digital transformation solution across the Enterprise consisting of 60+ sites.