Westburne Inc., is a wholesaler and distributor of electrical, electronics, plumbing, waterworks, and HVAC equipment. Annual revenues are approximately $2.5 billion. Westburne operates about 400 facilities throughout North America, and employs 6,000. SatiStar created and implemented an overall corporate Total Quality program for Westburne. Additionally, SatiStar created an “Umbrella” registration for Westburne that encompassed all 400 of their sites under a single registration.

In addition, SatiStar conducted 10 Total Quality Facilitator training sessions, and trained the company’s Information Technology group on continuous improvement. All work was performed in English and French. Major achievements include:

• Westburne became North America’s first distributor to become registered to ISO9001 (the most stringent of the ISO9000 series of standards).
• Each of the multiple regional registration audits was successfully passed on the first attempt.
• Implemented Continuous Improvement program which resulted in over 150 teams working on improvement projects (resulting in roughly 5M$ of profit improvement)
• Re-engineered the overall Order Fulfillment process for the corporation (Ontario division alone achieved a 22M$ turnaround over 8 months).
• EPS tripled, and share price doubled during the course of the re-engineering project (no change in sales or selling prices).
• Re-wrote and greatly simplified the corporate ISO9001 quality manual (from a three tier structure requiring roughly 400 pages, to a two tier one with 35 pages) – received extremely favorable feedback from Quality Management Institute (Westburne’s registrar).
• Enhanced Westburne’s market image to that of a quality leader.

General Motors recognized Westburne’s quality leadership by awarding a sole source outsourcing contract worth $100M annually in Ontario and Quebec.