Ramiro Villeda, Ph.D., is a manufacturing and operations consultant with 35 years of experience advising Fortune 500 companies across five continents. In 1985 he defended the first doctoral dissertations on Just-in-Time production in the Americas, supervised by Shigeo Shingo, a principal architect of the Toyota Production System. He has since worked at the intersection of operational practice and strategy, specializing in Lean manufacturing, the Toyota Production System, and the redesign of operating models for the AI era. He is the co-author of El Secreto de China: Estrategia de Competitividad (2006) and the author of the forthcoming Beyond Lean: From Toolkit to Thinking System — Recovering TPS in the AI Age. Based in El Paso, Texas, he leads Villeda Consulting Group, Inc.