Continuous Flow Work Cells


Overview

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.

Approach

The design and sustained operation of an ideal pacemaker cell will be taught through instruction, class discussions, and hands-on exercises. The workshop will step you through the initial cell analysis, creation and implementation of an improved cell. Practical worksheets, formulas, and checklists will be used and provided. A case study using a realistic production example will be used to learn concepts and generate exercises.

What You Will Learn

Participants will learn to:

  • Plan, organize and implement a pacemaker improvement plan
  • Systematically analyze an existing pacemaker cell and diagnose key problems
  • Identify, time and analyze current state work elements.
  • Systematically improve the design the future state consistent with Lean principles
  • Distribute the elements among the proper number of operators in relation to takt time.
  • Encourage operator involvement in improving the cell.
  • Balance operator work elements to expose waste.
  • Layout machines and workstations.
  • React to changes in demand.
  • Select the right level of automation.
  • Achieve sustainability using the Standardize / Do / Check / Act (S/D/C/A) model
  • Design overlapping audits for operators, team leaders, supervisors, and area managers.

Training Outcomes

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to analyze and improve a pacemaker production process in order to create and sustain continuous flow. Well designed and operated pacemaker cells generate significant benefits, including:

  • Improved cycle times.
  • Higher productivity.
  • Higher production output.
  • The ability to adjust cell operations to meet changing customer demand.
  • The ability to sustain higher performance.
  • Improved delivery performance to external customers


 

Training Overview

Our Courses

Manufacturing Control Systems

Quality & Environmental Systems

Strategy & Execution

Improvement Tool Kit

Presentation & Leadership Skills

Full Course List


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.