Prior to embarking on any improvement of your operations it is advisable to develop a profound understanding of the current situation and the opportunities for improvement. SatiStar’s Business Performance Improvement Assessment approach accomplishes these objectives. This rapid assessment provides you with an analysis report that incorporates a fully quantified, prioritized and comprehensive action plan for improvement.

Assessments are often designed to answer highly specific and narrow business questions, or provide answers to a well-defined business problem. In such cases, the investigation will result in recommendations for future actions surrounding such questions. Alternatively, the assessment may be a more general investigation of quality, efficiency, or profit improvement to name just a few typical assessment areas. In such cases, the investigation will result in highly actionable recommendations for performance improvement that can usually be achieved with little capital investment. These recommendations are integrated into a structured, high-level implementation plan. Our assessments are applicable in a wide variety of situations, including cycle time reduction, cost reduction, revenue or margin improvement, new product development, plant or office layouts, and vision alignment.

A business strategy articulates the overall direction of the business. It defines the intent of your business. A good business strategy should be clearly differentiated from those of other businesses in the same sector. Business strategies that are essentially identical to those of your competitors do nothing to help you differentiate your company from them – and potentially confuse your employees.

We’ll assess your overall business strategy and provide guidance if needed to accelerate you toward your desired vision.

Organizations are primarily social systems. Without people there can be no organization. The problem is that people are extremely resistant to change, even if it is perceived as easy. In order for meaningful change to occur the combination of organizational dissatisfaction with the current state, a vision for an improved future and the possibility of immediate, tactical action must be stronger than the resistance within the organisation.

Our consultants will work with your people to achieve “buy-in” at all levels.

Compensation Management is an integral part of the management of the organization. Compensation Management contributes to the overall success of the organization in several ways. Effective compensation management programs recognize the value of competitive pay and incentives, include the measurement of the contribution made by your human resources, and most importantly have an investment view of payroll costs.

Employee involvement significantly benefits a business by tapping into their greatest resources, their employees.

Transformation to world-class only happens if 100% of the workforce is engaged. Our approach ensures that everyone feels valued for their ability to contribute, and that their contribution is recognized.

An employee survey can help you to:

• diagnose issues and overall organizational climate
• anticipate potential problems
• assess teamwork and management style problems
• measure the effects of organizational change.

We can directly measure the morale and attitude of your employees using one of our standardized “barometers”, or by custom designing one specific to your organization.

We can measure the overall capability of your employees, identify gaps and suggest approaches to close the gaps that are consistent with your organization’s overall value system and all applicable legislation.

Sharing the financial gains with the people who help deliver them can form a valuable part of the overall incentive program for the company. SatiStar’s consultants can help custom design a gainsharing program for you.

ISAD is a SatiStar methodology for the top-down creation, integration and alignment of business and operational strategies, imperatives, objectives and commitments.

It culminates in implementation planning, development of key performance indicators, progress tracking mechanisms and the means for corrective actions when performance does not match the desired objectives.

A leader is a person who inspires you to take a journey to a destination to which you would not go by yourself. This is distinguished from the traditional manager, who simply maintains the status quo. Today’s business challenges revolve around change, innovation, passion and creativity – which requires leadership!

Delivering sustainable results is highly dependent on the quality of the leaders of the transformation. We’ll provide clear recommendations about the capabilities of your leadership group, and can then coach and mentor as needed.

Mentoring refers to a developmental relationship between a more experienced mentor and a less experienced partner referred to as a mentee or protégé.

A role we’ll often play is to be a knowledgeable guide, who can coach your people to excel.

As business processes change to reflect new and emerging business needs, the organizational structure often needs to be redesigned. This includes the organizational chart, positional changes, job descriptions, career paths, succession plans, etc.

It is one thing to pull out a piece of paper or open your graphics software and design a new organizational chart. It is quite another thing to build the right organization for the right reasons, staff it appropriately, then determine what is required to make that new organization work.

The correct sequence is to first build the new business processes, then create the most appropriate organizational structure that supports those new processes.

Policy deployment is a comprehensive, closed-loop management planning and objectives deployment process. The use of this process continuously improves both management capability and the reliable achievement of significant objectives. Policy deployment is increasingly being used by companies to help achieve and maintain a competitive edge. In leading organizations today, policy deployment is viewed as a core enabling technology.

Despite the claims by many that they separate their work from their personal lives, people are happiest when they work for companies that share their value system.

We’ll help design programs that respect the values of your most prized resource – your employees.

The purpose of a Reward and Recognition program is to recognize the outstanding behaviors that lead directly to the accomplishments of the mission and strategic goals of a division or unit.

An important consideration is to say “thanks” to your people for their contributions to your improvement effort. We’ll help design programs that maximize the return on this investment.

Too often people are thrust into a job with little or no training. We’ll help identify skills gaps and then assist in developing your employees.

Upgrading a specific skill can be as simple as getting a co-worker to show you how, or as complicated as taking a number of courses. SatiStar’s training consultants can help sort out what’s needed:

• assess current skill set of employees
• identify additional skills that they may need
• provide options for acquiring the skill.

In organizational development, socio-technical systems (or STS) is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces.

The term socio-technical system also refers to the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behaviour. In this sense, society itself, and most of its sub-structures, are complex socio-technical systems.

At the heart of successful, sustainable improvement is a well designed program that strikes a balance between the technical and the social aspects of improvement.

A common problem encountered in Lean, Six Sigma and TQM implementation is performance deterioration after the completion and handover of a breakthrough improvement. This can happen despite installation of control mechanisms to monitor ongoing performance.

To sustain continuous improvement requires an integrated approach to the management of the company both from the perspective of process improvement and the leadership and development of people.

Anyone can create short term results, but the real challenge is in sustaining them over the long term. We’ll analyze your organizational capability and provide a recommended roadmap that will deliver sustainable results.

Few people naturally work well in teams, but all can be trained in methodologies that encourage teamwork. Along with the training, SatiStar’s personnel are able to facilitate teams to successful delivery of sustainable results.

While most organizations perceive the Union and Management relationship to be adversarial in nature, the reality is that both have a common set of desired goals.

SatiStar’s consultants are well respected for their ability to enhance working relationships between the workforce and management – working towards a common set of goals

Clarity of purpose is critical to all organizations. Our structured methodology will enable your team to establish a clearly articulated, shared vision for the future that can then be communicated throughout the organization.