Operational Excellence & Lean Transformation Leader
Zouhair Lahia
I’ve spent twenty years walking into operations where the numbers looked good, and the floor didn’t agree. Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, CPIM, work across Canada,
Morocco, and Europe, enough of it to stop trusting a dashboard before I’ve walked the line myself.
How I Got Here
Early in my career, I watched a production line get shut down for two full days over a defect nobody could explain, not because the team lacked skill, but because nobody had ever agreed on what “normal” looked like for that process. Good people, bad definitions. Once we fixed the measurement, a two-day diagnosis became a fifteen-minute fix the next time it happened.
That’s the moment Lean stopped being a certification to me and became the actual job: not adding more tools, but making sure the ones you have are pointed at something real. It’s the same gap I’ve kept seeing across every operation I’ve worked in since — strong tools with no management system or mindset behind them to make them stick.
Background
- Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
- CPIM Certified
- Engineering degree, École des Mines, France
- Bilingual, French and English, running transformation work across teams and cultures that don’t always define “improvement” the same way
- 20+ years across aerospace, automotive, banking, and manufacturing operations
- Experience spanning Canada, Morocco, and Europe
- Currently leads Operational Excellence at a Quebec-based consulting firm, building an OpEx practice from the ground up
My Approach
I don’t believe in OEE dashboards nobody understands, Kaizen events that produce a poster and nothing else, or “digital transformation” that skips the step of agreeing on what you’re actually measuring. The work that holds up is boring in the best way: clear definitions, honest measurement, and a team that closes the loop on whether a fix actually worked.
Beyond the Office
I’m Moroccan-Canadian, married, and raising two kids (5 and 13) who have no idea what OEE stands for and are right not to care yet. Outside of work, I keep a regular meditation practice, train, read widely, and follow research in emerging technology — a lot of what I end up writing about later starts as something I was reading at 6am before anyone else was awake.
Why I Started TRI Principles Institute
The gap I kept running into, strong tools, no system to sustain them, is what TRI Principles Institute is built to close. The site’s framework (Operating System, Management System, Mindset & Behaviours) draws on Journey to Lean, the McKinsey study that first framed lean transformation as three inseparable layers rather than a toolkit. I didn’t invent the idea that all three matter together; I built TRI around two decades of watching what happens when organizations only ever touch one of them.
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