About eQMS
We recently battled through the emotional and cultural stress of transitioning from MIL-I-45208 to AS9100 for a company with 28 employees – after all was done we earned a 99% score from the NSF-ISR Registrar. There was a mountain of paper in the business and so many undocumented work instructions that took forever to clean-up. The old-traditional business effectively used MIL-I-45208 for nearly 40 years. We started the transition January 2006 and earned the certification in July 2007. Every Company is different and this 40 year old culture was thoroughly entrenched in its habits. About six months of the project was spent complaining about the task and another six months spent feebly implementing the requirements. After a year of unsatisfying work on the project the plant manager retired so we tried to renew the effort by scheduling a walk-through of the plant to point-out the practical status of the project from a Registrar’s point-of-view. We started at the bulletin board to find management communication about the QMS transition but that was about the only positive observation from our tour. We browsed the rest of the plant to observe too many findings that would shutdown the audit, which helped to establish the fact that the last year of work was not well spent. The new management was finally convinced that they were never really behind the project. After that day it only took three months to complete the project. We learned that the retired plant manager decided years ago to give support to QMS improvement projects but he knew none of his Customers actually required a QMS pedigree. The plant tour opened our eyes to “hidden agendas” from legacy employees that act like a cancer to kill the project. We re-learned what we already knew: “No management buy-in means a lot of money is going to be wasted on resources that could have been used more tangibly somewhere else.”
A very big part of the transition was to convert the plant to a visual workplace, create work instructions, and organize the mountain of paper chaos. We created every work instruction using the process map approach and dumped it into eQMS in a new category named “Manufacturing”. The QMS procedures and quality manual were also sorted-out into eQMS and every important record from the previous year that supported the project was put into eQMS. We also created a new category in eQMS for Contracts to enable every employee to find Customer requirements.
When the pre-assessment came the Auditor said that he normally has ten write-ups after only a brief tour of a plant. He asked why we were so good…! When it came time for the Auditor to verify our paper-trail he was so impressed that all his questions could be answered at any workstation in the plant that he remarked our QMS was in his top-ten list of businesses.
