A complaining customer provides you with a golden opportunity to demonstrate your organization’s commitment to excellence. Failures happen, but if you can recover from that failure in a world-class manner . . . then you have an opportunity to create a “wow” for your customer.

The 8 Disciplines of Problem Solving is a structured approach to investigating the causes of problems and then resolving them irreversibly, while mitigating the impact of the problem.

A world-class approach to eliminating the causes of customer compaints, SatiStar’s methodology is consistent with the Global 8D approach developed by Ford Motor Company.

APQP is a defined process for product development that provides a common path (between supplier and customer) and synchronization of these development activities. It ensures that appropriate and timely communication occurs within your organization, as well as between your organization and your customer’s organization.

Originally developed by the automotive industry, this approach to planning ensures that nothing is left to chance, and that the Design and Development function is fully integrated with operations in meeting customer needs.

A company’s environmental performance can have a significant impact on its success. ISO 14001:2015 is the internationally recognized standard for Environmental Management Systems (EMS).

An EMS provides a framework for managing environmental impacts so they become more efficient and more integrated into overall business operations. However, much more than this, an EMS can reduce costs, improve efficiency and secure a competitive advantage.

Good Laboratory Practices and Good Manufacturing Practices require the documentation of processes, procedures and work instructions to ensure that these operating areas function in a reliable and robust manner.

Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) is an internationally recognized approach to the management of the safety of food products. HACCP focuses on the prevention of biological, chemical and physical hazards, rather than the inspection of finished products. Potential safety risks and hazards are identified so that appropriate countermeasures can be developed to reduce or eliminate the risks. HACCP recognizes that it is both inadquate and inappropriate to merely “test” the quality of perishable food products – food producers and handlers need to carefully examine their food facilities, receiving, production, handling, testing, packaging and storage processes and ensure that all efforts are made to eliminate the risks of the hazards being realized.

A key requirement of any Management System is periodic monitoring of the functioning of the management system. SatiStar’s certified lead auditors are capable of performing this activity on your behalf, at substantially lower cost than doing it internally.

Once you’ve finally achieved registration to ISO9001, we’ll help you retain and improve it – whether or not we originally helped you implement it.

SatiStar uses the “process approach” for internal auditing!

In process approach auditing, the flow and focus of the audit is on the organization rather than the ISO 9001 standard. This means that we consider the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes of the management system and how they interface with other processes. This approach focuses on adding value and ensures that your company is continually improving in the areas that you define instead of just auditing for compliance to the standard. (The process approach to internal auditing is the preferred audit methodology of the International Organization for Standardization as defined in ISO9004.)

The ISO9000 family of standards are among the International Organization for Standardization’s (ISO) most widely known standards. The ISO9001 standard is implemented by just under one million organizations in over 176 countries.and is now the international reference for quality management requirements in business-to-business dealings.

The ISO9001 standard is primarily concerned with “quality management”. This means what the organization does to fulfill:

• the customer’s requirements, and
• applicable regulatory requirements, while aiming to
• enhance customer satisfaction, and
• achieve continual improvement of its performance in pursuit of these objectives.

The IT Infrastructure Library developed by the Office of Government Compliance (OGC) in the UK, now formalized in ISO20000:2005-Part 1 is the global standard for IT service management. It provides best practice guidelines for IT service management.

Medical device manufacturers have a responsibility to consistently deliver devices that are safe and effective.

ISO 13485:2003 specifies quality management system requirements for organizations that need to demonstrate their ability to provide medical devices and related services that consistently meet customer and regulatory requirements.

Many companies have multiple locations, and there are significant operational advantages in all sites using one policy manual and common, best-practice processes.

SatiStar has performed over 1200 QMS implementations for clients ranging from 6 employees to those with hundreds of locations, and tens of thousands of employees.

Quality Management Systems include, but are not limited to, ISO9001 for general business, AS9101 for aerospace, ISO/TS16949 for automotive.

ISO 45001:2018 is recognized as an effective Occupational Health & Safety Management System (OHSMS) for achieving improved and sustainable OH&S performance through control and systematic management of OH&S hazards and associated risks. The standard helps maintain a healthy and safe work environment.

The OHSAS specification is applicable to any organization that wishes to:

• Establish an OH&S management system to eliminate or minimize risk to employees and other interested parties who may be exposed to OH&S risks associated with its activities
• Implement, maintain and continually improve an OH&S management system
• Assure itself of its conformance with its stated OH&S policy
• Demonstrate such conformance to others
• Seek certification/registration of its OH&S management system by an external organisation, or . . .
• Make a self-determination and declaration of conformance with this OHSAS specification.

While Quality of products and services is considered critical to most organizations, the management of Quality is difficult to staff and support.

Well qualified and knowledgeable Quality leaders are extremely difficult to find, and competent Quality leaders can often be very cost prohibitive. SatiStar’s team can be your quality management function.

One of SatiStar’s core strengths is our fundamental knowledge of how business processes work.

We begin by rapidly creating process flow diagrams of your current business processes by interviewing the people who actually do the work. The success of your business is important to us, and we recognize that your employees have “real” work to do. So, we’ll work around the schedules of your employees in order to create these PFDs. Each of these PFDs usually requires a brief interview with the individual who actually performs the work. We’ll then post these highly visible PFDs in order to obtain input from all of the other people in the department who perform the same function. Our use of flip-charts and post-it notes speeds up the process considerably while making it visible to everyone. This ensures that the diagrams represent reality, and creates buy-in from employees at all levels. These process flow diagrams are then used as the basis for re-engineering the business processes and reducing cycle times. We then use various coloured post-its to identify ideas for the parts of the processes that work well, that don’t work well, and ideas for potential process improvements.

Quality function deployment or “QFD” is a flexible and comprehensive group decision making technique used in product or service development, brand marketing, and product management. QFD can strongly help an organization focus on the critical characteristics of a new or existing product or service from the separate viewpoints of the customer market segments, company, or technology-development needs. The results of the technique yield transparent and visible graphs and matrices that can be reused for future product/service developments.

SatiStar has performed over 1300 QMS implementations for clients ranging from 6 employees to those with hundreds of locations, and tens of thousands of employees. Most of our QMS implementations have been based on the globally recognized standard of management excellence – ISO9000.

Quality Management Systems include, but are not limited to, ISO9001 for general business, AS9101 for aerospace, ISO/TS16949 for automotive.

Similar to an ISO style internal audit , this gap analysis will also include a report on quality system effectiveness and efficiency.

With corporate governance becoming increasingly subject to stakeholder scrutiny, compliance to and deployment of a set of financial management standards has become mandatory for the board of directors of most organizations.

Policies document organizational intent, while procedures are used to document the general tasks of how a policy will be realized. Work instructions describe the details of the specific steps necessary to fulfill the general tasks described in procedures.

The degree and extent to which work instructions are required by an organization depends on the complexity of the process, the education, experience, knowledge and skills of the workforce running that process, the severity of the potential impact of that process on your customers’ processes, and the existence within that process of process controls (other than work instructions).