Certified Production Technician (CPT)

Orientation to the modern production floor: plant roles and shift structure, how work moves from raw material to finished goods, and the metrics a technician is measured against — takt time, throughput, scrap, and overall equipment effectiveness. Covers push versus pull production, work-in-process and why it accumulates, and the purpose of standard work. Establishes the vocabulary the rest of the program builds on.

Prepares you for: Manufacturing Processes and Production

Read and interpret production drawings. Orthographic projection, sectional and detail views, title blocks and revision control, scale, and the dimensioning conventions used on the shop floor, plus an introduction to geometric dimensioning and tolerancing symbols. Members practice translating a print into the setup steps and dimensional checks required at a workstation.

Prepares you for: Quality Practices and Measurement · Manufacturing Processes and Production

Material removal fundamentals and the operator role at a CNC cell. Cutting tools and workholding, speeds and feeds, coolant, machine setup and first-article inspection, loading programs, applying tool and work offsets, and monitoring a cycle for tool wear, chatter, and dimensional drift. Includes the daily machine checks that keep a cell running and when to stop and escalate.

Prepares you for: Manufacturing Processes and Production · Maintenance Awareness

Introduction to the joining processes a production technician works alongside: shielded metal arc, gas metal arc, and gas tungsten arc welding. Joint types and weld symbols, base metal and filler selection, heat input and distortion control, and visual identification of common discontinuities such as porosity, undercut, and incomplete fusion. Includes fume extraction, arc-flash protection, and hot-work permit procedures.

Prepares you for: Manufacturing Processes and Production · Safety

Measure, judge, and document conformance. Instrument selection and use for calipers, micrometers, height gauges, and go/no-go gauges; gauge repeatability and reproducibility; sampling plans; statistical process control charts and control limits; and process capability. Covers root-cause tools including 5 Whys and cause-and-effect analysis, the corrective-action cycle, and how nonconforming material is segregated, tagged, and dispositioned.

Prepares you for: Quality Practices and Measurement

Hazard recognition and the hierarchy of controls applied to a production environment. Lockout/tagout, machine guarding, personal protective equipment selection, hazard communication and safety data sheets, confined space and fall hazards, powered industrial truck awareness, emergency action plans, and near-miss and incident reporting. Prepares members for the OSHA 10-Hour General Industry card.

Prepares you for: Safety

Continuous improvement as it is actually practiced on a floor. The eight wastes, 5S, value stream mapping, kaizen events, visual management and andon signals, quick changeover, and total productive maintenance. Members map a real process, identify waste, and quantify the improvement a proposed change would deliver.

Prepares you for: Manufacturing Processes and Production · Maintenance Awareness

An integrated project that exercises all four MSSC modules together: read a production print, plan a workstation setup, build and run a quality check plan, complete a hazard assessment with a written lockout/tagout sequence, and present improvement recommendations supported by production metrics. Includes full-length CPT assessment review and timed practice across every module.

Prepares you for: Safety · Quality Practices and Measurement · Manufacturing Processes and Production · Maintenance Awareness