“With aerospace function and safety criticality, we absolutely need to know the status and location of every piece that could be considered a part. We have definitely upped our performance in the accuracy, flow and knowledge of status of “what’s in the bin.””- Tammy Wilson.
Permac Industries recently announced that they were just awarded their AS9100 certification, on their first try. AS9100 Certification is required by many OEM’s in the Aerospace industry.
I asked a group of employees at Permac what were the unexpected challenges and what made their efforts work.
If you are a manager, you might want to jot a few of these down.
Challenges
- Weren’t able to foresee many of the additional requirements.
- Weren’t able to understand the impact of some of these requirements on our processes;
- Weren’t really expecting additional paperwork- Our previous experience with Quality System implementations were that they helped us lean out our paperwork;
- Really had to embrace the Authority of piece count and build processes based on count.
Enablers of Success
- We really did have the right people in place;
- Those people had both the responsibility and authority to make the system and process improvements demanded by the AS9100 standard;
- They had management support when the changes were difficult to implement
- They felt that management was confident in their ability to make the changes.
Members of the team told me that
- Having strong existing systems made their job easier- they didn’t have to reinvent anything.
- They did need to tighten up procedures;
- They did need to add some additional procedures;
- They have focused more on supplier and production control
Congratulations to the team at Permac for getting this done right first time.
Do you have a success story to share?