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Assessment Paves the Way for Winning Award

With the help of: FloridaMakes

About

CAE Healthcare, located in Sarasota, Florida, with 150 employees, delivers specialized educational tools that help healthcare professionals provide safe, high quality patient care. Their end-to-end spectrum of simulation-based solutions includes patient, surgical and ultrasound simulators with virtual and augmented reality, center management systems and turnkey solutions. 

The Challenge

CAE Management embraces continuous improvement and asked FloridaMakes, part of the MEP National Network™, to conduct an enterprise-wide assessment to identify opportunities for improvement throughout the organization and provide recommendations to address the continuous improvement opportunities.

Our relationship with FloridaMakes has been great. I think we are supporting each other and making great things happen. This is a long-lasting relationship that should continue to pay off.

— David Machen, Manager Manufacturing Operations

MEP's Role

A FloridaMakes team of business advisors conducted a thorough assessment of the organizations processes in areas of leadership, strategy, customer focus, measurement systems, workforce and operations. FloridaMakes then provided a feedback report that identified the company’s strengths and potential opportunities for improvement and made recommendations to address the opportunities. CAE management ran with the recommendations and quickly implemented many of the improvement ideas.

Just a few months later, CAE was nominated for the Florida Sterling Manufacturing Business Excellence award and earned the Gold award for business excellence. Since then, CAE has continued their continuous improvement journey with FloridaMakes providing Kaizen events, project management, and training in Toyota Kata. CAE has now begun practicing daily Kata continuous improvement sessions on their own with savings estimated at $42,000 per year. The value of their layout transformation is estimated at $100,000 per year and the company will save $200,000 per year due to automation.

Created August 4, 2022, Updated February 4, 2023