About Us

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Alex Burnett is Principal Owner of Canna Innovations, a consulting firm specializing in teaching Lean thinking and creating purpose-built equipment to improve productivity in the cannabis industry.  

Mr. Burnett has Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering Technology and a Master of Business Administration.  He has been a certified ISO 9001 Lead Auditor and received Lean training by the Lean Enterprise Institute in Boston, MA.  

Prior to starting Canna Innovations, Alex worked at Texas Instrument and MEMC (now SunEdison Semiconductor) where he held multiple progressive roles including Process Engineer, QA Engineering Manager, Product Manager and Operations Manager of a 500-employee site. While in these positions, Alex led, managed, and performed work in areas of Lean manufacturing, problem solving, process control, quality systems implementation and certifications, and business intelligence deployments.   

Subsequently, Alex held a corporate role supporting FLIR Systems Defense Technology Segment. As the Continuous Improvement Director, Alex led Lean initiatives and business intelligence improvements spanning 15 manufacturing sites across 5 different countries.   

Alex has led over 35 Lean workshops and trained over 500 manufacturing, management and engineering personnel on subjects related to Lean management. It is through his years of experience that Alex recognized an opportunity in Cannabis due to the pending excess supply and subsequent price pressures.  Alex is driven to enable his clients to succeed through these challenges.      

It's Alex's goal to teach you to think differently about your business. As a client you will be lead through Lean assessments, development of Lean management systems, value stream mapping workshops, Kaizen workshops and leader standard work.  

While being a Lean expert, Alex is also an expert in Business Intelligence and offers data analysis assessments, services to build dashboards and reports, teaching Power Query, Power Pivot and Power BI.  His background in Quality Assurance and Process Engineering gives his clients great insight into how to better understand their processes, measure them and better control them.       

ACHIEVEMENTS:

• Improved Fresh Frozen harvest process for cannabis grower.  Cycle time dropped from 45 min to 15min, reduced floor space required by 60%, lowered labor cost by $21,600 annually.  ROI of 1,250%.
• Consulted with cannabis grower and achieved a 2X improvement in harvest productivity. Developed innovative equipment to eliminate excess motion in all horticultural harvesting activities. 
• Reduced WIP (work in progress) inventory by 67% ($637K) for a client who at the start felt it was impossible to reduce and maintain production level.  Coincidently, reduced the labor cost by 39%. 
• Reduced the manufacturing space by 53% while still achieving the same production output.  Additionally, reduced the product cost by 28%. 
• Cut the walking distance by 78% and subsequently improved productivity by 35%. 
• Developed and taught “Lean 101” course to ~150 employees in Kaizen affected sites Billerica, MA; Oak Ridge, TN; Eggemoen, Norway; West Lafayette, IN; Wilsonville, OR.  Course involves lecture as well as hands-on simulation. 
• Assisted in a corporate cost reduction project and coordinated with all sites in Defense Technology Segment during transformation effort resulting in $38M in savings.  Organized corporate presentations across the Defense Technology Segment for quarterly Steering Committee presentations on TFM (The FLIR Method), similar to TPS/Toyota Way, which led to ~$10M savings.  
• Conducted Leader Standard work training in Norway and 5S across Waterloo, Canada, and Eggemoen, Norway.  Developed one-page training summaries to support 7 Lean topics, in addition to our standard slide decks. Conducted Leader Standard work training in Norway and 5S across Canada and Norway. 
•  Leveraged State of Oklahoma funding to train personnel in Value Stream Mapping and Kaizen events.  The project resulted in WIP (work in progress) reduction of 78%, labor hours per unit reduction of 47%, yield improvement from 85.3% to 98.6% and overall cost reduction of 35%. 
• Led FLIR Systems - Explosives business through Quality System development and ISO9001 certification. 
• Managed the quality organization within MEMC Southwest to establish green-field quality system for a new $300M silicon wafer manufacturing facility (600,000 sq.ft.) and managed customer relationship with Texas Instruments during startup. 

He has won several awards within organizations he has served: Pinnacle Award – ICx Technologies, Quality Excellence Award – MEMC Southwest, Technical Excellence Award – MEMC Southwest, Quality Excellence Award – Texas Instruments, <3% of population.