Teamwork Leads to AS9100 Certification for Permac Industries

 

Permac Industries recently announced that it was awarded the AS9100 certification, on the company’s first try. AS9100 certification is required by many OEMs 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 had 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 needed to tighten up procedures
• They needed 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 the first time.

Do you have a success story to share?

 

Originally posted on pmpaspeakingofprecision.com blog.