Just to understand who my audience is how many here have a NADCAP accreditation raise your hands okay back there or as9100 or any kind of certification raise your hand okay oh good a few more good good good so I'm sure you guys love the audits when they happen right show hands how many love a good audit there you go that's the key there is the key word is good so my objective here today is to share our experiences of veterans medal I bought a 27-year old metal finishing

shop in 2020 in the middle of Co and it was when I came back from Kenya I was the CIO of AEL Africa decided Well do I want to retire or am I not ready for retirement kind of like when daya was talking about earlier wasn't ready for retirement yet and so we decided to move to the Tampa Bay area where we want to eventually retire one day and so we looked at different companies and we found this old 27y old metal finishing shop was completely analog completely manual they were definitely still stuck

in sometime in the late 80s early 90s and it was just a great experience to be able to acquire a company and then completely transform it because that was the objective was to transform the business so what I'm going to hopefully share with you today is some of that transformation and how we went from a manual shop which is labor intensive when it comes to audits I discovered because we did our first audit in the old shop NADCAP a and got got accredited for anodizing we do three things anodizing chemical

conversion stainless steel passivation but then in the new shop as part of the digital transformation process we changed all that no more manual no more paper and pencil everything was digitally connected in some way so I'm hoping to share that with you to put it in context what I'm going to do is I'm going to share with you a two-minute video to show that transformation project it was definitely a labor of love for about 19 months we had 22 different vendors involved in the transformation project

we were in a 5,000 square ft facility 10t ceilings no air conditioning including the offices didn't have air conditioning we had little portable units in there and we moved into a brand newly constructed building 15,000 ft we're going to add another 5,000 next year and it was all brand new so the only thing I brought with me from the old shop was people no equipment of any kind so let me show you that brief video so you can get a flavor for it [Music] good that's the old shop the old shop there

[Music] a lot of activity today [Music] [Music] [Music] well there you go 19 months of work captured in 2 minutes and 20 seconds as you can see it was a major transformation for our shop definitely a labor of love a lot of ups and downs but we were successfully able to complete it we've now been in our new facility for a year and a month so we just celebrate our first anniversary in the in the new facility why did I show you that video because I wanted to show you where we came from a lot of these

shops across the country are in that Old State right manual heavy paper heavy pencil and one of the dreams that I had was to definitely convert the shop and take advantages of efficiency through digital transformation I just want to Echo Dana said I don't work for steelhead I don't get paid by them we pay our fees just like everybody else but it's important to highlight when we have a partner and and steel hat has been an incredible partner in our transformation project so let's just make sure we

understand what NCAP is before we get into some of the things we do we were the first in the country to use a digital system to do our output for NCAP audits so the auditor was there everything we produced like the job audits for example was all done out of Steelhead as as just one example well our qms steel had supported that as well so we're certified not only in quality management system which is 704 but we're also accredited in our chemical processing 7108 and various what's called slash sheets

so NADCAP is the national Aerospace defense contract accreditation program they started in 1990 there was a demand to focus on quality I know a little bit about that because when I was in the Air Force I was the quality insurance program manager for two major commands so very heavy on on quality it was in my space and so and I got out in the '90s so that was a time where there was a lot of focus in that because there was a lot of accidents National Transportation safety board was look you look at

flights today right compared to maybe 20 30 years ago that there was accidents quite often you were hearing about and a lot of it had to do with quality issues it's a global program so it's it's not just here in the US it's all over the world they're focused mainly on aerospace engineering defense and related Industries and of course their board members include all what's called Prime so things like locky Honeywell rathon which are some of my end customers what's the responsibility of PR PRI is

the performance review Institute that's who administers our Audits and and manages those programs I don't know if you guys know it's a it's a 501 it's a nonprofit organization last year I think they read they generated about $50 million in Revenue they're all over the world and there's a big demand there's a huge backlog in audits many times audits gets postponed because they don't have enough Auditors that's why they're using contractors to perform some of these audits as well and I'm going to

get into a little bit about that a little later there's four main things that they do establishing audit criteria the second thing is training Auditors the third is conducting Audits and the fourth granting accreditation that's it those are the four main responsibilities the role of the Auditors or or NADCAP or PRI is not to invent criteria right so their role is to take industry standards and see if you're in compliance with those industry standards if you have an audit that comes into your plant

or facility and says something that's not in the spec or it's not part of a Aerospace standard then you can challenge that I've challenged things and I'll give you some examples later on so here's an example so this is right out of milspec 8625 which is the milspec for anodizing the corresponding sheet for NADCAP is 7108 which is chemical processing the slash sheet is the sl8 which is for anodizing and this is what they're auditing on are you complying with this spec if they add to this they're wrong

right because remember they hire contractors and some of them have their own opinions I'll give you a good example when we did the first audit in 2022 the auditor said you're supposed to use di water for your seal and that is absolutely false that is not what it says in the spec the spe says you can use di water as an example such as that's what the spec says so you can use any aquous material as long as in the end you're passing your periodic testing so I had that printed out I also contacted their

head of nadcap for chemical processing which is Nigel cook out of England he I wanted him to confirm it he sent me an email so I had those things ready so when I gave it to him he said oh I'm sorry you're right right so don't assume because the auditor tells you that this is the way it's supposed to be it is no they're supposed to be there to check on your compliance to existing standards not made up ones because of the auditor did it that way in his shop a lot of people don't realize that right

now neap is going through a point of inflection a lot of shops like mine perceive it to be a bit outdated if you look at the handbook that's provided by PR by neap and you look at the examples for example of their traveler cards or their po checklist you can tell it was typed on an IBM selected 3 typewriter how many remember the IBM select the three typewriters that's still there today in the handbook as an example right so it's kind of backwards thinking right they're still stuck in an old mode

and I will be attending by the way their annual user conference in Pittsburgh this October to talk to my peers and to PRI about advancing their state of mind their mentality digital transformation I've been in many conversations with Jay Solomon who's the president of of PRI he's very proactive and very receptive to advancing NADCAP into the future into a digital age and getting out of the old this is one thing I just mentioned about their handbooks very outdated but their objective of PRI also it's

in their mission statement to make it cost effective last last week we all got an email if you're net cab accredited they're going up 4% in January right so they keep raising the price every year a lot of it has to do with cost travel cost right the auditor they're Outsourcing the stuff these are not employees they travel from different parts of the world to perform these audits so a big part of that cost is that and also they're basing it on how long it normally takes to do an audit in the old

way of thinking right in the manual way of thinking pencil and paper so example my chemical processing audit for three different major processes is 3 days but if we use a digital output system why does it have to take three days right it shouldn't have to my quality management system was a two-day audit okay why because again it's an old way of thinking the manual process and I'm going when they're going to come to my next audit here in 2024 I want to see how fast they go because we just did our

audit in April using Steelhead and he was running out of things to do right cuz we're were just going so fast because everything was is there at the fingertips now what's some of our responsibilities we have many to achieve audits one is the document review process one of the things we did in 2022 when we were still manual the amount of paperwork involved you know I'm sure if I say an example you guys are going to resonate with it when you're in a manual shop it's all analog and you're working you

know your hottest tank is 160 degrees Fahrenheit and it's it's hot in Tampa Bay in the middle of the summer the last thing an operator wants to do is fill out paperwork while he's running the the parts right they're doing it at the end of the day and typically when they're doing it at the end of the day they're just pencil whipping the whole thing right they're just filling out oh yeah this is 5 minutes this was 10 minutes yeah that was the voltage and that was the amp and they just repeat everything

or they maybe change it by one digit but that's what they're doing all right they're human right at the end of the day they are exhausted so that that's part of our responsibility is the document review process training competence you know it's another part that's being evaluated during an audit certification any certification or any accreditation is that your ability to train your people what proof do you have that you've trained them and trained them well equipment calibration maintenance you

have to prove per that audit that your equipment has been calibrated does it have the calibration sticker is it certified do you have documentation to prove that you had it calibrated on a routine basis again a requirement on US Chemical management we have a lot of chemistry in my shop thank God we use software for it you know in the past it was first of all our lab was non-existent it was like a little folding table with a little chemistry set and it was just very poor but it was so labor intensive

and I I really had doubts about the results right it wasn't I I don't feel it was accurate at the time when we bought the business it was kind of also another pencil whipping function but again you have to demonstrate that to an auditor quality control demonstrate your quality control functions do you maintain your non-conformance reports do you maintain your rmas do you contain your corrective action reports how do you maintain those those are things you have to present to prove that you have a

quality management system in place risk management how are you maintaining risk you know Parts control is a big part of it counterfeit is a big part of it especially you know my for my particular business 75% we do is actually goes to the Department of Defense right so there's cui information now we're talking talking about cyber security as well so all these things during a NCAP audit especially Parts control risk management counterfeit parts we have to demonstrate and prove through some means

supplier control how do you V your suppliers are you do you show that you're actually checking them on an annual basis are you doing supplier surveys are you giving supplier feedback that's part of the audit as well that's your responsibility internal audits you're required to perform internal audits plus you have to do a pre- audit in order to do your submission prior to the actual audit taking place on your premises our responsibility again and continuous Improvement showing that you are continuously

improving your process and I put the word some on purpose because these just are the sum of things we have to do in order to prove that we are in compliance of standards and imagine how much paperwork is involved in this and if you're a small shop in the State of Florida we have 24,000 manufacturers 80% are 20 employees or less when I bought the business just four employees we have 16 we're going to add another eight over the next six months so we're growing really rapidly but I wear many hats right

and one of them is to prepare for these audits right that was one of my hats along with my plant manager so it it's it's labor intensive to be prepared preped for these Audits and it's very disruptive anyone who tells me it's not disruptive you're lying because when you get auditor your premises first of all you're preparing for their arrival making sure that all your tees are scratched off your eyes are dotted and then when you get on when they get on site it's very disruptive when they're there

especially if they're there for an entire week for 5 days like in our case pass a compliance method I'm going to give you some examples it it was all paper and pencil nothing was connected so that was how we were capturing our anodise tank number three our temperatures on a daily basis right so imagine this is being captured right but it's not connected to anything it's not going anywhere this is this is one example another example here so these were Traver cards at a part level that we were using

that I inherited and my daughter who's the office supervisor is here she'll tell you we had file cabinet after file cabinet after file cabinet of these cards of parts and how many of these were duplicated it was just crazy we men now we don't have them anymore they got scanned and shredded because we're 100% paperless shop now no paper but that's how we were maintaining the travel cards at a part level then we've got oh the pH checks right we had the daily pH checks this is the monthly this is my

favorite so my predecessor was doing his his stuff inhouse for salt spray test so you have to check to see if it could handle a salt chamber for 7 days or 14 days depending on the process you were checking and and so I had these sheets that said pass little check marks and I asked well how are you doing that and and the description I got was very odd this is very suspect for me right this this quality aspect we today Outsource all our periodic testing to a third party we do not do any in the house

why because that's not our Core Business our Core Business is to run Parts P spec so why should I have to be afraid of sending it to a third party CU all my colleagues in my neighborhood that does metal finishing say oh don't don't cuz if you fail you know they're going to have to do recall all stuff we we've been doing this now for two and a half years and we've never had an issue right and it shows integrity on our part too to our customers right when we provide these really professional high-end

reports from these third party nagap accredited periodic facilities right so that was one example and the last one here Believe It or Not my predecessor has how he was doing invoicing right so those are the invoice numbers the customer and the amount and the check he got right so just I want to put it in context what we were doing was so so incredibly inefficient and it's important because even in NADCAP you have to show control of your purchase order process right are you do you have all the basic

information if you go to the handbook in NADCAP it'll say does it have a part number Does it show the material type Does it show the process type is it referring to a spec is it a current spec you know all these things are on a checklist and if if you're missing one thing it's a minor finding right so this is is just a great example here real examples of my old shop of what it used to be like I'm going to give you a list of future compliance methods not necessarily particular to Steelhead there are

many things that steelhead does cover there are some things that are not part of steelhead maybe a different party or maybe PR themselves one is digital documentation management we use a combination of of Steelhead but we also pay for Google Drive Services because it has Version Control and then we're working on other things to re to focus on cui which is controlled on classified information for the future cyber security another one is audit management software so we do regular audits we have some

things that are audited on a monthly quarterly semiannual annual bases that's all done through our software most of that is in steelhead today mobile applications I'm a big fan of mobile applications not just Steelhead but everything in my shop is connected so right now my phone I could tell you exactly from my new state of-the-art waste treatment plant how much waste have I treated and dumped into the city sewer at this moment so if it's not within the flow rate parameters upper and lower control

limits I get notified in alert right why is that important well one you want to be in compliance especially with EPA right but also it costs money you're paying for money coming to your plant you're paying for stuff going to the Sewer right it's there's a cost involved so I want to know that my flow rate is correct so I'm a big fan of mobile application utilization cloud-based bat forms we're not in the it business right the only thing I have in my plant are laptops and desktops right I don't have

servers or or some it no everything is in the cloud through a thirdparty provider whether it's my chemical analysis which I use Anoplex for or whether it's my Mees which I use Steelhead for or some of the other things that I was mentioning about the water discharge that's all in the cloud I do not maintain any equipment because why that is not my business I'm not in the it business I'm in the metal finishing business right so I I'll source that data analytics and reporting tool a lot of that comes

from steelhead I'm going to provide some examples of that because that then in turn provides information for our NCAP audit process chemical management software I was mentioning I use a combination of both Steelhead and Anoplex the Anoplex provides my upper and lower control limits it has all the standards already pre-loaded whether it's U military standards or general standards like Boeing has their own standards right and so that's already been pre-loaded and it tells me how much to add or how

much a decant it does it automatically for me and it keeps control and does all my Trend analysis for me real-time monitoring system again I'm a big believer in proactive systems right what's the biggest problem with an analog shop you don't know it's broken until it's broken right you know there's a problem Until It Breaks and then you have to worry about lead times you got to order something my old shop we used heaters electric heaters for all the tanks we got rid of all the electric heaters now

we have a natural gas boiler system that heats all my tanks automatically 6:15 in the morning it kicks on and it monitors within plus or minus 2 degre right and it notifies me through my phone if I have an issue right right and then if we feed that information through into Steelhead as part of my NADCAP poit which I'll show you some examples in a minute electronic dating capturing tools again it goes back to Steelhead mainly in this case we were one of the early adopters I'm not sure how many other

early adopters in using a QR code scanning system you see they've got some sample tanks over there we implemented that on day one so all our tanks are using QR codes and so I have a a scanner just like you see at the grocery store it's the same kind of Android handeld scanner and my linesmen are always scanning the ins and outs it gives them a lot of real-time information they're able to do real time updates to that information all our processes all our chemical recipes are at a part level so every

part is unique we don't treat one shop fits all and because of the software we're using Steelhead we're able to do that and what we get we get repeatability right my rework weight rate went way down when we digitized the shop all right because you got Johnny doing it one day and Tommy doing the same part the next day they never did it the same all right now they do it the same every single time automated reporting system and I'm going to give you example of an automated report and by the way at

the end of the presentation there a little QR code you can just scan that it has contact information for the business but I think my phone number is there I'm happy to send you real PDF files of our job audits for NADCAP like for example the anodise is seven pages long because it captures everything from start to finish I'm happy to send that to you as an example so you can see what the output looks like so all you got to do is just email me or if you want to have have a phone call I'm open for that

as well and the last one is audit REM audit capabilities this is my favorite it's not happening today but I Envision and one of the things I want to be talking about in Pittsburgh in October to the pr people is help us reduce this cost of our audits we there's no reason why we can't use augmented reality where an auditor can be anywhere in the world and visit my shop and perform the audit without physically coming that's still a ways and it's going to be hard for people to adopt there's people that

just love the fact they're using pencil and paper and has to be physically present to do things I don't believe you have to all right there's enough technology out there that you can virtually do these audits all you have to do is set up some cameras in the shop your auditor has a an AR headset you have another individual like myself having another headset and we're walking together through my shop in order for them to perform the audit that is totally doable that is coming but I got to convince

the people who been doing it the same way for 30 40 years right that's the challenge now let's look at using steel head for net cap audit so these are some of the bullet points of what I use it for there are other things that I'll be able to use it for as well but there's real D data collection process monitoring traceability genealogy automated reporting quality management Trend analysis and compliance management all these things feed into getting your audit and I can tell you when we implemented

the first software in the old shop which was Anoplex he spent literally 30 minutes on that part of the audit oh yeah I know Anoplex oh yeah there's your other your Lo okay let me see your Trend analysis okay you're good to go check that off it's done right the same thing happened when we implemented a Steelhead and we're using it for our job Audits and some of our qms functionality as well if you're a user of steelhead you should be familiar with this page these are the operational tiles the ones

that I'm highlighting now are the ones that we use in some way feed into a NCAP audit output there may be more but these are the ones that we used in our last audit in April so let me show you an example of the purchase order so my daughter who's the office supervisor and the rest of her staff they use this as the part of the net cap checklist this checklist is directly from the audit criteria right and if they don't check something off they get notified hey is this a yes or no you can make anything

required in steelhead you want to make it not required that's fine the point is that it's on our checklist right and it is exact mirror image of what was typed on the IBM select the 3 sometime in Circa 1990 right so that's now in Steelhead and what's great about this is in my old shop there was some things like a part number for example we had to enter it by pencil five different places right a a part number five different a customer five different places quantities five different places I mean

it was just nuts this feeds into everything it feeds into the reporting output it feeds into your certifications CU some customers require shirts right apart from your audit outputs for KN cap but all this you enter it once and it's done and then you decide how you want it to feed into other things here's a good example Randy's my PL manager he's here with us today so this is Randy he made the cover of product finishing magazine December where we actually were featured there yeah you see very famous

you'll sign autographs later in we were featured with steelhead the feature of auditing right of how to make this a digital process so what Randy does every morning or his delegate will go ahead and enter every morning and we don't have this connected yet but all our tanks have monitors that are going to what's called an HMI controller right it's what controls my compressor that actually opens and closes the valves for hot and cold water to come into the tanks right and so he makes a note of all

the temperatures for all the tanks that morning enters into Steelhead one time that then translates into all the jobs for that day and then also what does that serve it serves as a maintenance function right are we not within parameters a temperature rope can go bad right so there's several things that it feeds into but it does feed into our NADCAP reporting because we're required to show at what temperature did you run that job at so anodize type two 67 plus or minus 3 hard coat 34 plus or minus

two that's our recipe by the way no mpect says what temperature is supposed to be you just have to pass the periodic testing right that just happens to be what works for us and we can successfully pass all our testing just a note so if you get an A says well that's supposed to be 69.5 no it has to pass test I can make it a 100 even though it's not going to work but it I can make it what I want work but it I can make it what I want work but it I can make it what I want to but the point is I'm showing

that I have control of my process that's what they're looking for in the audit here's one of the reports out of steelhead so this one shows PHS there's a measurement criteria that's already here these are the trend analysis is from my hexavalent trient my seal tanks and when I have little Peaks and valleys like this it's a great conversation as part of my daily production meeting right what's the issue here you know why did we have these Peaks and valleys so I use this trend analysis information

is part of my daily I have a daily production meeting every day I have it with my plant manager then I have it with the office staff and then I have it with my a QA staff and then I have it with my a QA staff and then I have it with my a QA lab lead so the three different things that I have 30 minutes each that's it all right and we use Steelhead and this is just one example the reporting but this information ends up going to the NCAP job audit report right so you're going to see the job audit report

here in just a moment so here's an example this is the page out of steel head this is a seven-page report for anodise Class 2 for my customer FK instrument they've been around for 75 years one of our top three custom in the company and this is the first page and it's in Step order right already in steelhead so this is a template that I've already created and it populates from all the data entry whether it came from the work order whether it came from the sales order whether it came from the daily

maintenance but it all Aggregates and gets into our report and this example is that 7188 and this is straight out of Steelhead and I'm happy to send you a copy of the entire report if you guys want it so let's break it down a little bit let's look at the header for example so again the source information so standard template for for all my major processes so it's already been pre-populated this comes from the work order this comes from the work order this comes from the data entry that Randy does

in the morning and this also comes from the work order again it's an example of efficiency right I am eight times more efficient when we moved into our new shop now we're even more efficient because we've learned after we moved into the new shop but an 8X factor from old to new right and I used to be able to process no more than 50,000 Parts a month in the old shop my predecessor could only do 25 we did 50 so we maxed it out the new shop has a capacity of doing a Million Parts a month so we have

a lot of growth right a lot of Runway ahead of us we're right now we're running about 180,000 Parts a month so and we're we're growing very rapidly but to show you an example of the header and where the information comes from straight out of Steelhead again this is my daughter there with our senior linesman Lionel he's been doing this for 35 years one of the original people that I started with from day one first step of course is qms inbound inspection right Q 09 we have all our quality management

system documents it's already been pre-loaded in Steelhead and when they bring up the lines we use iPads and scanners right everybody has an iPad and their own personal login that person who's doing that inbound inspection has a criteria to follow they'll follow that step and they'll check it off and then it marks it what does it do it also gives me who did it right because lonel use his longin and the time stamp by the way this is an old example it's no longer GMT stuff here it looks like this

now but it came from routine work that we're doing every day using our our equipment the bottom half again using the QR code scanners what did I capture here again what are the Auditors looking for they're looking for that you have a standard and you're following a standard so in this case the first tank is an industrial cleaner how many parts that I process five what was the the measurement that was taken by Randy it was in the industrial cleaner for a little over two minutes in this particular

case it pass criteria is more than two less than 10 the unit of measurement is time in the tank and when that it happen Okay that's what the otter is looking for the point is this is real it's not pencil width and you can see them here that's the that's the scanner there there's Randy again Randy you're very popular today so you can see the very first tank the soap tank and him scanning it we're running about simultaneously anywhere between six to eight jobs at the same time some of these racks

contain three or four work orders at the same time so we can have many jobs running simultaneously but we're using the scanner to not to have to worry about that and plus the scanner also tells us that we're doing the right thing right so this scanner is how does what did I tell my auditor I show him this he says how do you make sure you don't put in the wrong tank well steel head's telling me it's the wrong tank right because when they're scanning it they'll say no it's the wrong tank right there's

a little eye candy there will tell you that you have to go to this tank this is the next tank you have to go to there's a countdown right green yellow red telling you how long it should be in the tank for so you don't exceed your your values right it's all about repeatedly I don't want my people to be computers right I want them to use tools all I want them to do is use their head when it comes to development of the recipes of those parts when we get them for the first time and then we actually

have a strategy meeting we have a contract review meeting which is also part of steelhead to review what that recipe is going to be once it's done it's done the linesman just has to follow it water break is another big issue if you're in the anodizing world or chem film World that's a criteria that's a milspec requirement and a lot of people get a minor finding because they're not performing water breake tests what's cool about it in Steelhead if it doesn't pass water the visual water break Steelhead

will force you to go back again and start again to the previous tank until you say you've passed it we have three inspections we have inbound postprocess and outbound inspections in our shop if if you say you passed it you're going to have a problem with the plant manager disciplinary wise because you've just pencil whipped it digitally that's the only thing right but what's great about it that is we have so many steps in our digital process that we're going to capture people trying to circumvent

the system right but water break is an important part of NADCAP getting accreditation showing that you've performed it because if you don't get a good water break it's the process is probably going to fail at the end right I love this feature because people were not adhering to water break right now they have to pause they have to check this box they have to make a conscious decision to say yes and if it's really no then I don't want them in my team right so this is a great tool and it's helped us

a lot especially on reworks right because of following the water break test as an example here's another example of a body this is one tank the seal temperature the seal tank we're required to get the time the temperature and the pH it's a requirement to demonstrate that Steelhead already captures that information so Randy in the morning already got the pH actually my QA lab lead got the pH Randy got the timer in this case it was Ryan Brit who did both and then he actually ran the part later in

the day and that was his time so he was five parts it was 5.7 minutes the minimum value is 5.2 for this part and 6 minutes maximum so that was the captura of information but again it's all about efficiency we entered it one time it was entered at 6:30 in the morning temperature in PH this part was ran a little later in the day at 9:30 a.m.

and and we were able to capture it in real time no pencil whipping just to show you where the source data came from and my message here is the source comes from one place and it feeds it multiple times across the entire platform Parts control when I give a tour of a potentially new customer and they come into my office they see this big giant TV screen on my wall okay this is my dashboard and we have it siloed in this case and we have receiving racking online process invoicing and what's in shipping

the auditor sees this immediately one of the requirements is Parts control right when I bought the business there was a table it was a sheet of plywood on these horses basically and everything inbound outbound was on one table can't tell you how many customers my first week in owning the business were picking up somebody else's parts right there was no parts control or they're picking up parts that had not been done yet right it was just nuts and so this demonstrates you know perception is reality

you've heard that phrase this demonstrates that we are in control and then when I show the auditor I say okay let me click on Catamount and I can go show them the recipe at a recipe level I can click even lower show them the picture of the parts we have something that we call a racking recipe right because you have to wreck Parts in a certain way to maximize your potential success right if you don't wreck it the right way you can get bleed out you can get air pockets all kinds of problems we do

that because we want if Tommy does it one day and Jeff does another day and they open up Steelhead they're going to see how it was racked and they're going to Rack it the same way every single time right my old shop I couldn't do that so the auditor sees this me you guys are really have control of your parts right and so he's just flying through that section about parts control little other eye candies that we've added ourselves expedite quality critical special racking instructions so again the

auditor sees that they could tell that we are in very much in control of our processes there's another section for non-conformance it's not populate because we just archived it all this is a quality management dat board in steelhead I used this when we were getting audited it's got Parts on hold non-performance reports corrective action reports return merchandise authorizations and parts failing specs so this is important part of also especially you're trying to get a quality management approval

whether it's as9100 or 704 in NADCAP this is all in Steelhead and we're able to see the whole paper trail from the moment it failed until the moment it was fixed right this demonstrates that we do have not only a quality control process in place but we have process Improvement because obviously corrective action includes what are you going to do so it doesn't happen again right and that's all that paper trail is here right it's blank now because we don't have any issues when I printed this last Friday

I want to now transfer to a little bit of Q&A my purpose here was to give you some real examples of what we're doing I'm looking forward to our next audit to take it to the next level my goal is basically to reduce that audit time that disruptive time in my shop so when the auditor is there he's not there for so many days he should be able to easily knock it out with a digital system in a very short period of time much more than he does today so I'm hoping to advance that ball when I go to Pittsburgh

at the new user conference here in October and I think the possibilities there they're very receptive to everything I presented I've had my head buding moments with the PRI but we've gotten past those things and I think we're all both on the same page right now do I have any questions anybody would like to ask I just wanted to ask it's really impressive how much of your process you have loaded into Steelhead what was the timeline on getting all of that information into the system first of all I

can tell you let's just take it in two parts the steel H implementation for us was a f based approach we did not do a big bang so we started in the old shop doing quoting and then we started sales orders and then after sales orders we started doing QR code scanning after that invoicing and then we did the knap part because the NADCAP was something we did not done I'd say labor hours in total was about 24 to 36 total labor hours over a 45-day period to implement everything that I knew that we needed

for NADCAP in order to successfully pass the audit so that that was the total time involved but we were doing a lot of things already the problem was that we did not have any reports yet right we had CS but we didn't have the NCAP reports and I think correct me to our wrong gu steelhead we were the first right for the NCAP output reporting yes Jeff says yes so you may not have to go through the same trials and tribulations we did now it's it's a much easier process and if I add more services I think

it's going to be much faster as well Jeff did you have a question yeah I had a quick question we talked a lot about the time to prepare for an audit to complete the audit and the the drain and energy that you guys are putting on something that frankly customers don't really care about they care about quality Parts yeah this is overhead to the business and taking overhead down is a huge unlock on what you can do with that capital and your management time and energy but how about your interaction

with customers we had another shop in in Texas that was went from acely avoiding quoting jobs that had really intensive certifications because that they found like the cost processing the certification was just as much as the actual job right to kind of proactively pursuing those jobs but then also putting extra traceability information on almost as like a marketing differentiator like you ask for five things I'm going to give you 15 just to show you that I can so I'm just curious from how how the

interactions are with the customer you cannot measure NCAP accreditation let's just take steel hat out of it just for a moment for an Roi based on how many net cap orders you get right you have to base it on how much your market share or your wallet shares increase as a result of everybody knowing that you're NCAP ACC credit they may not have NCAP orders I can tell you for a fact that we've substantially increased our number of customers because we're NADCAP accredited but they're not sending us NADCAP

sh jobs we're providing them certification right certificate conformance that's requirement but I can tell you in year one when we first did the first audit which is in 2022 in those 12 months we got seven NADCAP orders seven now granted we we've grown since then we're getting a lot more on a on a daily and weekly basis but I can't tell you how many customers say oh are you certified and then I ask them well neap certified or even as9100 certified and you know I I tell them well we are NCAP certified

and I said are you going to send us NCAP oh no we don't do NADCAP orders we just want to make sure you're we just want to know you're certified right or accredited right that's the response so from a marketing perspective I am milking the heck out of it right I do a lot of heck out of it right I do a lot of heck out of it right I do a lot of social media postings we do a lot of work with product finishing magazine like we did with Steelhead we did a lot of work with the corrosion and Co coding magazine

we do things on Instagram Facebook we really promote things and we're going to have a meeting this week with PRI and their marketing team I've been trying to get a hold of their marketing team for six months okay because we were the first in the country to provide a digital output for our audits finally Jay who's the President says I'm going to fix that and the next day I got a phone call from their head of marketing right so I I think it's really important to understand There's an opportunity here

for growth it doesn't mean you're going to get more jobs that are NADCAP required jobs but damn it it does leave an impression that you're standing at a higher level of quality and commitment by having these accreditations whether it's NCAP whether it's as9100 or any other certification we are certified personally certified by loed we're personally certified by L3 Harris we have now SpaceX coming next month to do an on-site audit they don't like neab I'll tell you right now SpaceX doesn't like them

I don't know what the issue is but there's some problem there but they're going to come on site they're coming because we are credited through neap because they know that we have a higher standard not that they want that or need that right so I think from a marketing perspective it's been a huge Boom for us all right we have one more question here we are currently trying investing in industrial and trying to upgrade our controls like industrial automation systems and my question is does Steelhead

interact directly with your plc's or do you have some kind of scata system or something that yes I'm trying to bridge the gap between how to connect it to Steelhead because I so we have what's called an HM HMI and also our rectifiers have a PLC as well installed when I when I modernized the shop I had them all retrofitted not for the purposes of immediately connecting on day one because I had so many irons in the fire we were dealing with 22 different vendors to stand up this new facility I just

couldn't handle anymore and plus to do the interconnection it depended on if it was Steelhead evolve or that producer of that equip involved the cost I just didn't want to assume it at that time I already had I was way over budget already at that point but yes part of our road map and I was just talking to Steelhead last night about this is to connect from the HMI straight into steel head so Randy doesn't have to do the manual entry every morning so that is absolutely part of our road map I've got

my RO system my waist system my natural gas boiler my Chiller and my Mainline controller and my fully automated stainless steel Sy is fully automated all pre fitted with an ethernet connection So the plan is to eventually transfer that and direct to connected to Steelhead yeah I was just going to say that's on our product road map have an API for you guys to directly poster censor measurements recorded electronically in the Steelhead so all right thanks thank you very much Andrew [Applause]