WHAT IS AME?

AME Australia is a membership association that facilitates connections, collaboration and learning in the operational excellence space. 

Members regularly meet to explore lean thinking, discuss improvement methods, exchange best practice ideas and network with like-minded individuals to further their careers and improve business performance. 

About AME

• The AME in Australia is run by a group of volunteers from both business and academia who tirelessly provide their support, energy and the resources of their organisations in order to help your local and regional businesses grow and prosper in today’s challenging global marketplace.
• The AME helps practitioners to understand, optimise and improve their capability and overall business performance so that they can deliver, over the long-term, sustainable improvement.
• AME Membership gives you access to; education and training, improvement practices, tools, and resources and an extensive network of peers both locally and overseas.
• Today, our organisations require increased productivity and specialised solutions. To support this objective the AME’s power lies in mentoring relationships that take place among our members and their respective organisations. AME provides company’s with access to first class educational programs and events, where attendees can learn from industry thought leaders about the latest leading-edge improvement topics. At these events participants get the opportunity to network and share ideas with fellow practitioners.
• The AME offers a forum whereby members can keep up to date with new and developing operational and management techniques. Members can stay ahead of the competition by learning about practitioner-implemented process improvements. 

The AME Model

All AME learning events are aligned to the AME Lean Sensei, a powerful Members only tool to help your organisation identify potential areas of focus and improvement.

The latest AME Lean Sensei® will connect you to articles, videos and other training materials that are personalised to help you and your organisation make improvements in the areas of need identified by your AME Lean Sensei® assessment.

AME Lean Sensei® provides information to help you identify areas for improvement and provides best-practice trainings, videos, articles and more to help you continue your operational excellence journey.

To be recognised as the leading association for operational excellence.

Mission

To inspire a commitment to operational excellence through experiential learning by bringing people together to share, learn and grow. 

Values

• Volunteerism

• Practitioner Focused

• Integrity and Trust

• Passion for Excellence

• Engaging and Welcoming

Our History

The Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) was founded in 1985. It is an international, not-for-profit organisation based in North America. The AME is dedicated to cultivating, analyzing, and exchanging productivity methods and their successful application in the pursuit of operational excellence.

The AME (Australia) was formed in 1999 due to a presentation Jim Watkins delivered during a ‘Manufacturing Best Practices’ course facilitated by the Centre for Manufacturing in Melbourne, Victoria. After meeting with a number of interested participants after the presentation, Jim mentioned the AME and the excellent work they were currently doing in North America. Having recently attended a number of North American AME conferences, Jim was very aware of the value of such an organisation and, consequently, was very keen to develop a local affiliate in Australia.

After this initial meeting with the people soon to become foundation members of the AME’s Australian chapter, letters of support were sought and received from several local manufacturers. Due mainly to Jim Watkins’ reputation and extensive contacts, other interested people soon joined the fledgling project.

Eventually, a steering committee was formed thanks to the hard work of everyone involved and the support of the then Victorian State Government Office for manufacturing. The AME (Australia) began to develop and grow into the organisation it is now.

Today, the AME (Australia) is essential locally and internationally, a fact that can be demonstrated by AME (Australia) hosting the first international conference to be held outside of North America. The first conference was held in Melbourne in May 2004, remarkably only five years after Jim's idea for an Australian branch was floated.  

The AME (Australia) has expanded to a diverse industry network welcoming members from all industries, including manufacturing, transport, supply chain, government, education, finance, agriculture, pharmaceutical, life sciences, health care, and more.