Easily Maintain Quality Standards in Your Shop with Steelhead's Quality System

Welcome to Real Talk featuring Steelhead's quality management system that makes it easy to maintain a high bar in quality standards. The first step to solving any problem is identifying the problem, and once you know what's wrong, you can easily take next steps to resolve it.

How are you managing quality today? Is your QMS system digital and integrated into the production floor? Do you know your cost of rework? Are you seeing parts fail and don't know why? Does your quality workflow reduce the speed of getting parts out the door? With a great quality system in place, you will see improvements in quality, being able to quickly identify trends and make informed decisions. This drives continuous improvement, saves time and money, and once you're able to pinpoint a problem, you can take the steps necessary to solve it once and for all—keeping rework costs down, impressing auditors and customers, and easily maintaining certifications digitally.

Steelhead tracks everything in the moment without you putting pen to paper. Steelhead is the all-in-one job shop and contract manufacturing ERP that enables you to move parts—not paper—with a fully digital production floor and fully integrated system.

Let's jump right into the operator's workspace. Workboards have a highly simplified interface built for your operators to quickly be in and out so they can focus on the work in front of them. For example, let's say I'm an employee working in receiving. We have these parts here that I was moving with the forklift, and they fell and got scraped up. With access to the quality management system, putting parts on hold is the easiest thing to do anytime, anywhere. Anyone can do it—just click "Work Parts," click the carrot here, and select "Quality Hold."

For any reason that parts need to be put on hold, you would use this quality hold function—even if it's just waiting on inventory to come in. Fill in the info here including quantity, description of the reason for this hold, and any custom input section that can be customized according to your shop requirements. Attach a picture of the damaged parts if necessary. You can do this from the work order page as well.

Operators generally will be in this workboards view when setting up Steelhead. Certain permissions can be given to certain users, but only permitted users will be able to take parts off the quality hold. Your quality team has instant access to everything going into quality hold—no operator needs to go look for the quality manager to tell them what's going on.

You have filtering options at the top, and you can add more filters as desired. On this first card, you'll see any parts that have been put on hold. As soon as an operator puts parts on hold, they'll show up here. If you check the parts and decide they are okay, just click to send them back into production—they'll instantly show up back on the operator's workboard where they can resume work.

If it's decided that documentation is needed for a problem, you have the option to create a non-conformance report (NCR) describing what the problem is. Quality hold information appears at the top of this report along with customizable input sections where you can give the NCR a name, fill in details, attach relevant files, and save it.

Parts with NCRs created are listed in another card where you can edit them or create new ones from scratch. You can also create corrective action reports (CARs) or send emails directly from here. These same icons are used across NCRs and RMAs as well.

Once parts are approved for production again, just click "Remove Hold," fill in your information, save it, and update their status to "Released." You then have the option to close the NCR which removes it from your dashboard list.

Within Steelhead's reporting dashboard, you can quickly check insights that help identify trends such as costs or reworks over time. Charts are configurable so you can view data however you'd like—for example, tracking reworks by part number or year.

Steelhead's QMS is an excellent tool for resolving problems, identifying areas of improvement, saving money over time, and driving continuous improvement.