“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.

Lots of Teamwork.
Lots of Teamwork.

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?