For the team involved in technical analyses.
Run the analysis loop from context and symptom to verification, in a common language for the whole team.
- Course days
- 1
- Prerequisite
- None
- Credential
- Diploma
The SEM Academy
Courses for engineering under pressure
The SEM Academy is the course platform of IKAR Solutions OÜ. Its courses are aimed at quality, operational excellence, development, production and project management during launch and series production, above all in plastics processing and at suppliers to the automotive industry.
Each course combines course days with a guided transfer phase. The app leads the participants through the learning path; the instructor sees the learning status in the Course Register. The first cohorts take place on site at your company, later ones remotely.
The app runs in the browser, without installation and without an account. The learning status stays on the participant's device; participants send reports to the instructor themselves, and no server stores participant data. This makes coordination with IT and the works council easier.
All courses are also listed in the catalog of Lernheim, the learning platform on which the app and the Course Register run.
Why
Which problems the courses solve
Companies engage IKAR Solutions OÜ when a technical escalation is under way: at the customer, in the launch or in running series production. We take over the analysis, implement the technical solution together with the team on site, build a reliable data basis and handle the communication with the customer so that trust develops and the escalation subsides quickly.
We pass on this knowledge, drawn from more than 30 years of escalations at vehicle manufacturers, suppliers and start-ups, in the SEM Academy. In the staged path up to the Certified Escalation Engineer, your team learns to react quickly and reliably in-house.
Leading customer escalations
A defect pattern at the customer, the delivery has to be secured, and the customer wants a date. The team records the situation, works several mechanisms in parallel and defends every decision with its rationale.
Launches without disruption
Shortly before the start of production (SOP), a process becomes unstable. Every trial is set up beforehand so that it distinguishes between mechanisms; changing three parameters at once costs weeks and explains nothing.
De-escalating
The team tells the customer what is established, what is open and by when. Interim intervention, robustness and optimal solution stand in an order that the customer and management can follow.
Reducing scrap
Scrap that has fluctuated for months and gets briefly better after every trial. The analysis separates the mechanisms and applies the intervention where it eliminates the mechanism.
How you measure the effect: time to the leading mechanism, number of trials per escalation, recurring defect patterns, and scrap before and after the course.
Courses
The courses
A click on a course shows result, duration, course flow and credential.
SEM Academy
Structured thinking under industrial pressure
Three courses that build on each other, for teams that lead technical escalations in development, launch and series production.
An escalation in series production rarely has just one cause and never just one level. A defect pattern at the customer, a running series, a delivery that has to be secured, and a decision that falls before all findings are in.
The Strategic Engineering Matrix brings structure to this situation. Several mechanisms are worked in parallel, findings are chosen by their discriminating power, and interventions are staged by the context. In the end there is a decision the team can justify to the customer and to management, even when not everything is known yet.
SEM complements 8D, Ishikawa and 5-Why. These methods stay in use; the matrix is added where several mechanisms act at the same time and time is short. In the 8D report to the customer it supplies the content for D4 to D6: the leading mechanism with the findings that carry it, the chosen intervention with its rationale, and its verification. The 8D format of your customer stays unchanged.
For the employees who lead analyses.
Document defect patterns completely, build workspaces with several mechanisms, classify interventions and stage them from the context.
- Course days
- 2
- Prerequisite
- Foundation
- Credential
- Diploma
For the employees who lead escalations toward the customer and management.
Break escalations down into their layers, consolidate them into a Decision Pack and present the recommendation to the board.
- Course days
- 2 to 3
- Project work
- 30 to 50 hours
- Prerequisite
- Practitioner
- Credential
- Diploma
For everyone who commissions simulation results, reads them or decides on them.
Read simulation, assess it and translate it into decisions.
- Course days
- 1
- Prerequisite
- None
- Credential
- Certificate
Request: Understanding and assessing 3D injection molding simulation
From the prologue
A Monday, 06:47. Of the parts from the night shift, eighty percent have broken in the alcohol test. The team has been working on the fault for three weeks, and the production launch is in five weeks. In the first week the customer wanted to understand what was going on. In the third, the customer wants a date.
A trial for which it is settled beforehand which result supports which mechanism and which result excludes it brings the team step by step to the mechanism that carries the symptom, and to an intervention that eliminates it. A trial without this question can deliver today’s parts. Whether it prevents the next escalation, nobody knows afterward, because it remains open what had the effect.
“SEM: Thinking Under Pressure” by Ingo Konrad Dentz
Who teaches the courses
Ingo Konrad Dentz
Owner and managing director of IKAR Solutions OÜ, author of the SEM Academy
Since 2006 he has run IKAR Solutions, today IKAR Solutions OÜ in Tartu, as an independent engineering partner for injection molding, with assignments in Europe, Asia and the USA for OEMs, tier-1 suppliers and start-ups. His work combines process, mold, materials science and simulation, plus Design for Six Sigma. From 30 years of escalations in injection molding he developed the Strategic Engineering Matrix and wrote the book “SEM: Thinking Under Pressure”. He teaches the SEM Academy courses himself.
Own instructors: Whoever holds the diploma of the next higher level can teach the courses in their own company, following the compendium, the cases with solutions and a teaching demonstration. IKAR Solutions OÜ gives the approval.
Companies we have worked for
Selection. The cases in courses and book are anonymized and not attributed to any of these companies.
Request
Request corporate training
Tell us the course, the number of participants, the period and the location. We reply within two business days with a proposal for the setup and the price. Participants and instructors receive the links to the app and the Course Register with the invitation.
The form runs through Lernheim, the learning platform of IKAR Solutions OÜ; your request goes directly to us.
Questions in advance: sem@ikarsolutions.com or +372 5685 8955
Thank you, your request has arrived. We reply within two business days with a proposal for the setup and the price.