Patrick Graupp

Vice President & Senior Master Trainer
TWI Institute

Biography

Patrick began his training career at the SANYO Electric Corporate Training Center in Japan after graduating with Highest Honors from Drexel University in 1980. There he learned to deliver TWI from his mentor Kazuhiko Shibuya. Mr. Shibuya was trained by Kenji Ogawa who was trained by the four TWI Inc. trainers sent from the US to help Japan rebuild industry in 1951. Patrick earned an MBA from Boston University while heading Sanyo’s global training effort. He was later promoted to the head of Human Resources for SANYO North America Corp. in San Diego, CA where he settled. 

Patrick partnered with Bob Wrona in 2001 to conduct TWI pilot projects in Syracuse, NY that became the foundation for the TWI Institute which has since trained a rapidly expanding global network of over 1200 certified trainers who are now delivering TWI training in the manufacturing, health care, construction, energy, and service industries in the US and around the globe. These efforts were outlined in their book The TWI Workbook: Essential Skills for Supervisors, a Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize Recipient for 2007 and in its Second Edition. Patrick is also the author of Implementing TWI: Creating and Managing a Skills-Based Culture published in 2010, Getting to Standard Work in Health Care: Using TWI to Create a Foundation for Quality Care published in 2012 and now in its Second Edition, and Building a Global Learning Organization: Using TWI to Succeed with Strategic Workforce Expansion in the LEGO Group, a Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize Recipient for 2015. His latest work is Creating an Effective Management System: Integrating Policy Deployment, TWI, and Kata published in 2020.