Manufacturing Control Systems


Training Overview

Our Courses

Manufacturing Control Systems

Quality & Environmental Systems

Strategy & Execution

Improvement Tool Kit

Presentation & Leadership Skills

Current Offerings

Few consulting firms have world-class expertise and capability in as broad a range of manufacturing control methodologies as does SatiStar. If we have any bias at all, it is towards simple, proven methods that can deliver results quickly, often within the framework of a workshop.

Our commitment to you is to always recommend the improvement tool that is most relevant, rapid and effective in achieving your particular improvement goals. This website lists many of the major tools that we offer training in. Many more training courses are offered on a custom basis. Call us if you would like to review your improvement goals and strategy.

Continuous Flow Work Cells

Every shop floor has at least one pacemaker process where products take their final form for external customers. These processes control how well you respond to external customers, and drive demand for internal upstream processes. Poor cell design or a drift from Lean practices can generate widespread performance problems. This 2 day workshop teaches you how to carefully analyze and improve this key process, and sustain the gains made. Skills taught in this workshop are transferable to upstream work cells.
 
Those who would benefit from attending this workshop include operators, engineers, managers, supervisors, technical support personnel and change agents. Organizations that would benefit from this workshop have processes that are:

  • Completely manual production.
  • Operator-driven cells.
  • Production lines incorporating automated equipment.
  • Conveyor-driven production lines.
  • Partially automated transfer lines (with operator work stations).
  • Organizations that have implemented value stream mapping and have begun implementing lean in other areas of their organization.

This workshop does not apply to a customized job shop.
 


Human Performance in Aviation Maintenance

This workshop will raise awareness of human error and to understand how to prevent or reduce the occurrence and consequences of human error in aviation. Participants will learn about Human Factors, the discipline of optimizing human performance in the workplace, as well as about Mistake Proofing, the tool to identify human errors and to develop and implement technical changes to eliminate the human error.
 


Kaizen Breakthrough

While Kaizen is an extremely powerful approach to improvement, it generally is not sustainable in the North American world, primarily because it tends to be activity-based. SatiStar’s approach to Kaizen implements the methodologies while respecting the North American culture and bias. Our Kaizen programs are highly customized – and tailored to the customer as well as the eventual OEM. The outcome is a culturally-integrated Kaizen program that achieves sustainable results.
 
This two day workshop is designed to provide give attendees the theoretical concepts required to perform a kaizen, then immediately have attendees use their new learning to implement improvements within their own company.
 


Lean Kaizen Projects

A Kaizen Project Workshop is a self-learning activity aimed at dramatic and rapid performance improvement and waste reduction using Lean principles. While isolated Kaizen projects can be useful, they are most successful when they are part of an overall Lean transformation strategy. Kaizen projects have a narrow focus, targeting, for example, set-up, productivity or 1 piece flow projects. Although one-half to one day is devoted to a formal training workshop, Kaizen projects are as much about hands-on learning and employee involvement as they are about raw implementation. Ideal kaizen projects involve employee teams that develop, test and implement their own high return, low cost solutions.
 
Any type of business will benefit from this focused improvement effort. Those that want dramatic short-term improvement in a critical area or process and those who want a “hands-on” approach to improvement will find this tool to be highly effective. This workshop can be tailored to focus on either operational (shop floor) projects, or on transactional projects that streamline office processes and information flows. Those who would benefit from attending this workshop include:

  • Members of the leadership and management team.
  • Cross-functional Kaizen teams from across the organization.
  • Supervisors and technical support personnel.
  • Change agents responsible for implementing Lean.


Lean Manufacturing

Lean Manufacturing, which is also known as the Toyota Production System, is a complex manufacturing system that took Toyota about 15 years to develop. Although many view Lean Manufacturing as a system to drive out waste, the ultimate purpose of implementing Lean Manufacturing is to dramatically improve bottom line profitability. The lower cost structure that comes from driving out waste allows companies to be more competitive and improve their revenues, while the focus on customer needs serves to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, producing secondary revenue and profit improvement impacts.
 
Many companies who try to implement Lean Manufacturing get lost in the techniques and intricacies of implementing Lean sub-systems to the point that they lose their Lean compass—Profit Improvement. SatiStar’s Lean Implementation Strategies workshop provides a proven method for Lean implementations that will keep your organization focused on doing those things that will have a significant impact upon profit improvement.
 
Our workshops also deal with the social issues and obstacles that are normally encountered when implementing Lean Manufacturing systems such that you will be able to anticipate and overcome these potential obstacles and maintain a high velocity of Lean implementation, as well as dramatic and rapid improvements in your bottom line.
 


Lean Manufacturing - Executive Overview

Lean Manufacturing was pioneered by Toyota, and is an all-encompassing approach to maximizing overall organizational efficiency. Equally applicable to manufacturing and service businesses, Lean has been successfully implemented in thousands of leading companies worldwide.
 
Lean thinking is a process, not simply a collection of improvement tools, that you use to look at your business (manufacturing, service or any other activity where you have suppliers and customers).
 
Lean enables you to assess your organization from the customer’s perspective and determine how to eliminate the waste properly – knowing when and how to apply the tools to maximize results. When applied properly, you will reduce your lead time, reduce your costs (bottom line), reduce defects and increase responsiveness to emerging customer demands. Your company becomes world-class!
 
In many cases, efforts to implement Lean have stalled because the organization involved used various Lean techniques without sufficient thought about creating a culture that would enable success.
 


Lean Office

Lean – it’s not just for the shop floor anymore. A lean office eliminates waste and saves time and money.
 
Lean is not a new concept in the manufacturing industry. For more than 25 years, Lean has been successfully implemented on the shop floor to eliminate waste and increase revenue. It is only recently that companies are using Lean Office as a key productivity factor to streamline and eliminate waste from their office and administrative processes and achieve bottom-line savings. Consider that 60 to 80 percent of all cost related with meeting a customer demand is an administrative or non-production-related function. Therefore, to be “Lean,” the concepts must be understood, implemented and sustained throughout the entire company.
 


Lean Production Control

Lean Production Control is the next logical step beyond making value stream improvements for individual product families. This workshop addresses how to implement a Lean production control system, using pull thinking and production levelling to tie together product family flows across the entire facility.
 
Those who would benefit from attending this workshop include production control, manufacturing management, technical support and purchasing personnel and lean change agents. Organizations that would benefit from this workshop manufacture some standard products made using multi-step processes, and have mastered some basic lean tools and concepts.
 
This workshop does not cover operational planning (including capacity planning, forecasting, master production scheduling, or material requirements planning) or the material flow within a cell or from a purchased parts supermarket to a cell.
 


Lean Purchased Material Flow

This 2 day workshop will teach you how to move and handle purchased parts from the receiving door to the shipping door. The focus is on designing and implementing a system that reliably supplies purchased parts to continuous-flow cells, small-batch processing, and traditional assembly lines. The design and management of all aspects of a comprehensive Lean material handling system are covered, including routing, kanban systems and parts markets, as well as sustaining and continuously improving the system.
 
Those who would benefit from attending this workshop include:

  • Material handling and production control personnel, managers, supervisors, operations and support personnel, and change agents.
  • Organizations that require purchased parts for production.
  • Organizations that have had some experience implementing lean elsewhere in the organization.


Lean Simulation Game

Lean Manufacturing was pioneered by Toyota, and is an all-encompassing approach to maximizing overall organizational efficiency. Equally applicable to manufacturing and service businesses, Lean has been successfully implemented in thousands of leading companies worldwide. This 1/2 day highly interactive workshop is targeted at all levels of an organisation and allows everyone to experience the power of Lean first-hand.
 


Lean Six Sigma - Executive Overview

This 2 ½ day workshop is designed to provide executive level participants with an overview of the concepts of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) in manufacturing and service organizations. The LSS methodologies and tools provide a reliable approach for achieving world class performance improvement through employee engagement. Lean Six Sigma has been profoundly successful across a wide variety of private and public organizations. This workshop is for those individuals who are tasked with creating an environment that fosters and sustains LSS improvement changes in their organization. Organizations that have successfully implemented LSS have enjoyed substantial and sustained performance improvement.
 


Lean Six Sigma - Green Belt Training Program (DMAIC)

This 5-day workshop rigorously follows the DMAIC approach that provides participants with a globally-recognized methodology for rapidly and dramatically improving the output of their business processes. Participants will learn how improve their processes to maximize throughput, reduce costs and cycle time and improve overall quality. The course will also teach participants how to incorporate Lean principles into their improvement activities. These methodologies and tools, used world-wide, provides a reliable approach for rapidly achieving world class business performance improvement.
 


Mistake Proofing

Even in businesses where processes are well controlled and people are well trained, human errors still inevitably occur on a chronic basis. Unfortunately, the financial consequences of those human errors on business performance can be very high.
 
Mistake Proofing (or Poka-yoke) was “invented” in 1961 by Dr. Shigeo Shingo to achieve ultra-low defect levels by tackling human errors in the workplace head-on. Shown to be remarkably successful, Mistake Proofing programs and applications can now be found world-wide.
 
This technique is most often deployed in production and design processes and is commonly integrated into many improvement programs and quality systems.
 


Principles of 5S

Originating in Japan by Masaaki Imai, 5S is a disciplined & systematic methodology for creating a clean, safe, orderly, high performance work environment. It is one of the foundations of a Lean System and supports the principles of waste reduction. This workshop provides participants with a methodology for creating a clean, safe, orderly, high performance work environment.
 


Principles of Lean Construction

This 1-day workshop provides participants with an overview of the fundamental principles and techniques of Lean techniques in Construction. Participants learn how to rapidly and dramatically improve business processes throughout the entire organization using the concepts of Lean originally developed by Toyota.
 
This methodology, used world-wide provides a reliable approach for achieving world class performance improvement through employee involvement. Organizations that have successfully implemented Lean have seen cost savings for controllable costs on the order of 40%, and project delivery reliability rates increase by 75-85%.
 


Quality Function Deployment (QFD)

SatiStar’s Quality Function Deployment (QFD) Workshop provides participants with a thorough grounding in the design intentions, methods, and skills required for implementing QFD. In this workshop, the use of QFD as a tool to help with the increasingly difficult challenge of translating customer needs into superior product and process designs, design metrics and product features is explored.
 
This two-day workshop provides a thorough introduction to Quality Function Deployment (QFD), the most comprehensive and objective tool for translating customer needs into superior product designs. Quality Function Deployment is also presented as a means of dealing with conflicting data and points of view to generate better and more innovative ways of responding to customer needs.
 


Supplier Capability Assessments

Supplier performance is becoming increasingly important; as your customers place additional demands upon your organization for faster and more reliable deliveries, better quality and lower prices. It is critical to maintain your key suppliers and develop their capabilities, and identify problem suppliers quickly to eliminate them from your supply chain. Supplier capability assessments are an important tool that will enable you to identify your suppliers’ base capabilities and their performance and system gaps.
 
Implementation of an effective assessment program also includes the creation of action plans and a progress reporting system to monitor the progress that your suppliers make towards your agreed upon objectives.
 


Supplier Development

Supplier performance is becoming increasingly important as your customers place additional demands upon your organization for faster and more reliable deliveries, better quality and lower prices. This course is designed to provide participants with a thorough grounding in the tools and techniques used to develop and improve a company’s supplier network. Strategies for sourcing will be covered along with the tools to qualify suppliers and evaluate their performance. Supplier auditing as well as developing supplier improvement objectives and reward programs is also covered, to provide a complete framework for improving the performance of your company’s supplier network.
 


Supplier Management

Supplier performance is becoming increasingly important as your customers place additional demands upon your organization for faster and more reliable deliveries, better quality and lower prices. This course is designed to provide participants with a thorough grounding in the tools and techniques used to manage a company’s supplier network. Strategies for sourcing will be covered along with the tools to qualify suppliers and evaluate their performance.
 


Supply Chain Management

This course is designed to provide participants with the strategies necessary for effective leadership of the improvement of business processes throughout their company’s entire supply chain. Participants will learn how to design and structure their company’s supply chain to maximize economic value added to the eventual end user of the company’s products or services.
 


Theory of Constraints

All organizations face constraints in their processes. A constraint is anything in an organization that limits it from moving toward or achieving its goal, which for most business organizations is to make money now as well as in the future. There are two basic types of constraints: physical constraints and non-physical constraints. A physical constraint is something like the physical capacity of a machine. A non-physical constraint might be something like demand for a product, a corporate procedure, or how managers run the organization.
 
Theory of Constraints (TOC) is initially applied to solve problems of bottlenecks, scheduling, and inventory reduction. This causes a shift from cost-based decision making to decision making based on continuous improvement of processes in which system throughput, system constraints, and statistically determined protective capacities at critical points are key elements.
 


Total Productive Maintenance

Many organizations face the double challenge of needing to provide significant improvements in asset uptime and reliability, within a context of tight cost constraints. This workshop provides the Total Productive Maintenance approaches and tools used by organizations that have achieved world class maintenance performance. This workshop provides attendees with a solid introduction into the strategies, principles and improvement approaches used by leading industries to achieve and maintain breakthrough maintenance performance levels.
 


Value Stream Mapping

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a simple tool that helps you visualize process performance. It is not a process flow diagram, nor is it a shop floor layout tool. VSM is often the first step in a Lean Manufacturing transformation, used to understand “current state”.
 
VSM looks at both material and information flows by product family. It allows the user to determine process time and lead time for the current state business process and calculate the effects of process changes for some improved future state.
 
This workshop is designed to provide participants with a working knowledge of the concepts of Value Stream Mapping and it’s application. It is for those individuals tasked with implementing Lean process improvements in their organization.
 


WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

SatiStar's Experience Makes The Difference!

  • . . . worked extremely well with the departmental and site managers . . . goal oriented and met the objectives set within the quoted budget and ensured the results were attained for the Company.

  • The guys from SatiStar did more in one week than we were able to do in 6 months.

  • Achieving ISO registration was far less onerous than we thought, our employees really rallied to the cause. The registration effort really brought us closer together as a team, and SatiStar really came through for us when we needed them.

  • We started this process a year ago with Mickey helping us create a spaghetti map of our processes on the whiteboard, and then his team guided us through their streamlining methodology and got us to where we are today. Our processes now look nothing like the spaghetti map – and we’re much more efficient today

  • This projected cycle time reduction of over 80% annual cost savings amounting to over 3% of sales, one-time savings of roughly $10 million, and working capital reduction of roughly $30 million really have us excited!

  • An outstanding success with Motorola’s vendor audit! What made this an exceptional achievement is that it typically takes 4 to 5 attempts to pass this audit. SatiStar’s expertise made it easy to avoid all the extra attempts.