A little bit about me said I had a degree in agriculture business which seems like why is a guy from farming coming into manufacturing I knew the owner of the business we'll go with that a lot of what my experience was in school was dealing with food manufacturing which is identical to manufacturing Metals it's a lot of similar Concepts as I came to find out a little bit about Sapphire Metal Finishing we're going to kind of go in the history a bit and just our kind
of our journey to ISO and so we're we're over in Caldwell Ido and right next to boisey was founded in 2017 so I started not long after they began and the owner of the company he gave his reason why he started the company said I had the privilege of working as the president of reuse motor sports during this time I had occasion to be frustrated with our anodizing Partners a ruse distrib distributor in Great Britain pointed out that we were losing sales because the finished components of one of our
most basic products a clutch were wildly inconsistent in color at the same time long anodizing lead times negatively impacted our ability to ship to our customers on time and tied up cash because we had to maintain five times more inventory in finished goods as I analyzed the inconsistency we were experiencing with the anodizing industry I began to feel that improvements could be made after careful consideration and planning I decided to leverage my education skills and work experience to start
anodizing company in a lot of ways he basically just got mad enough to to start his own company a little bit about ISO 901 Andrew did a really good job talking about nadcap the the the requirements ISO is real it's it's really similar not quite as intense as nadcap and essentially what you have to do is you say what you do and you do to do is you say what you do and you do to do is you say what you do and you do what you say in your procedures if you say you're doing something you better be doing
it it's to to help you keep a consistent process have continuous Improvement and deal with your quality management getting to ISO 901 I I warned my quality manager I was going to put a picture of her couldn't resist it I was like you're going to be here at least in spirit in March 2021 the boss Dwayne asked me to get started on it he's like here's the spec here's what you need to do figure it out and I had zero experience in it so we decided we should hire someone who actually had some experience
we hired a quality manager and she had done certifications before and so she was able to to kind of get get our ball rolling we also went to some as9100 training which is also similar big part for me with that one was learning internal audits CU you got to do those internal audits the next phase of of us getting to ISO we started looking for an Erp was we were on paper and I'll show what our previous paper system was a little later we knew we could get ISO with paper but it was going to be much
more difficult in 2023 we still hadn't gotten an Erp online but my boss was getting real tired of the dragging the feet there was we just weren't quite getting there and he's like just with paper go just make it happen because as stated before with ISO 9,000 1 or any kind of certification there's customers that will will come to you whether they need it or not but because they like the certification so in August 2023 we had our first internal audit and then October 2023 it was decided to kick the
old Erp system out because we still hadn't had it up and running over after a year and a half and we found steelhead brought it online by February and then in April 2024 we decided we had our second internal audit before our our actual ISO audit and that basically just taught us hey we're we're ready we've got everything covered and steel heads covering all these things and then in July of 2024 so just recently we passed our audit and we're an ISO so the things that made that audit easy that steel
had helped us with we had the work in progress tracking maintenance and sensor dashboards quality management easy to record and recall customer requirements able to refer to uploaded files and incorrect routing is very difficult with steel head so with a whip tracking for those that you know you're on Steel so you know what this looks like you know this is just a a little blurb of a work order you can see where these parts are how many are there these are all things that this auditor just was blown
away by she had never seen a system quite like steel head where you could just see everything at the touch of a button and here we see it just the same thing this is all the part transfers we can s you where that part went who touched it how long it was there and that really showed the control that we that we had so maintenance and sensor dashboards for this is a little blur that our auditor she actually mentioned maintenance isn't part of iso you don't have to have it's not part of the spec but
because we put it in our in our procedures and everything like that we had to have it with this one we had to show that we controlled our tanks and just like with Andrew it's identical thing you can see on this day all of our measurements and that we're in Spec quality management with this one we didn't have any parts on hold when I took this picture we had an NCR currently in Pro in in process but the parts on hold really saved us a lot with our audit because we have our little cage here to segregate
anything that's non-conforming or waiting for disposition or just a defect that we're not sure we need to be asking someone and it can't be just immediately asked we've got our cage here physically but digitally because we were able to just separate it no one could move it until a quality hold is removed it really showed that auditor that we were very quality focused and and we were going to control that product and then with our ncrs as well you know we can see here's these two parts that were
were reworking and that's where they are and then C customer requirements was a big one we'd always struggled in our old system to record customer specific information sometimes it's po specific in this case this is actually the customer page for one of our customers and most of our customers and you probably have examples of your own they don't give you the information or they're like we want this blue but only you know what that blue looks like you know you know from previous instances so we we
found that in steelhead we found this place where a conversation where we can put all that data this is all the weird stuff about that customer when they asked for this this is what that means and then when we pulled up a sales order the fact that on the floor we could pull up the original purchase order from the customer they she she loved that because if there was any question about it then it could be checked on the on the spot the next one was that all the data is available that we could repeat
things we could do the same way every time so here we see I've got a couple of these images over our work boards we got a part we can see what it looks like I mean unless we've got a requirement that we can't take pictures of it then of course we won't but we can see what that what the racking Department what rack they put it on and the name of the rack that way next time we don't have to retrain an operator and they can do it the same way every time same way with this one this customer didn't want
me to put a lot of information but it was the best image I could find we got picture of the part plugged and it was hard to do it but there was actually three other pictures of this part that we had that you could scroll through to make sure all sides were mased correctly it only have happened the one time cuz once everyone figured out that oh we wait they can see this they know for sure who who messed up they paid a little more attention to what they were doing then the other thing we call it receiving
double check but contract review so we added that after our receiving because of the complexity of our process there's just so many different ways you can go there's a bunch of opt-ins and opt outs that can be with our process we realized that we we needed a second pair of eyes not the most efficient we we know that but we just found that having that second pair of eyes looking over that that PO and and and the process especially for new parts was necessary which was great because there's only about
five people in my plant right now that that are authorized to press that button yes or no and they've been trained they they know the process well enough to go through okay Yep this is this is this is ready to go all right I jump back to here I should have brought my tablet up here as an example of what we what I did for most of the audit was I walked around the auditor literally just with my tablet for about an hour and just oh you want to look at that it was it was great because she ran out of
things to do she actually went home early did you pay less no no like we were literally in our conference room cuz that was that was the thing we actually went around the plant for part of the audit and they were pretty much in our conference room the whole time just pulling up data it was an incredibly fast process part of it was because our documentation is also digital so it's easy to recall but she was just like show this to me and we're just sitting there on steel head just showing her over
and over again just whatever part you want to look at but I kind of wanted to show you this this SL again it was kind of a slow burn and then all at once basically with with Steelhead and I'm going to talk about a little after that Steelhead's not everything there's other things you need to have to be ISO 901 but when we when we've gone on Steelhead there was just a lot of confidence in the company that we were going to pass the quality manager and myself were like we're going to pass there's probably
going to be some findings we're pretty sure about that but once we got Steelhead online it was also on the plant 4 that they were also sure that we were going to pass my chemist actually he he was he saw me preparing for the for this and he's like I don't I didn't think we were going to pass at all until we got Steelhead so some of the things that that we did besides Steelhead so Steelhead's great but I just want I didn't want you guys to to think if you're on Steelhead that you're ISO compliant
there's quite a few things and Andrew already covered quite a few of them management review meetings ISO requires that you've got to have these meetings you got to have some kind of system for continuous Improvement and some of that is your your quality management you just got to make sure you have that documented you got to have your internal audits you've got to have document control like your procedures your trainings and other documents supplier quality management you know how are you raing
your your suppliers you know you've got all your suppliers in but you got to have your procedure of how how do you qualify them customer satisfaction surveys and then your physical organization of your plant so one of the reasons why there was such a I want to back up to there there was such a gap besides the Erp between when we hired our quality manager and when we're we're like okay we're going for ISO 99000 is we had to kind of organize the plant better there's the digital space and the physical
space we we weren't very organized in the physical space and so we did a bunch of you know 5S bunch of different things to kind of clean it up to make it a lot more streamlined and and which also made it easier to to bring on to Steelhead I'm not familiar with 90001 at all thank you it looks like it's a lot of kind of inputs right they're looking at some you know things and checking the box like do they measure for like actual results like could you check the box on all that stuff and show them
Steelhead but still kind of consistently hit you know 70% on time delivery and yes super high rework and yes so a lot of it it's not in this spec and I'm sure there's those who may correct me a lot of it is what you put in your procedures so if you say that this is what we will hit if you're not hitting it they may be like what why aren't you hitting this like they're they're not going to do a major finding they just made from the words of our auditor and and our quality manager is is whatever you
put in your procedure is whatever you put in your procedure they'll find a reason to to ding you if you're not doing it but they may not like disqualify you for ISO 901 as well but one of the questions we as we've looked at implementing you know like Steelhead and you know other you know even cloud-based tools is document control you know is there any requirements that you came across for the software specifically that you have to document not really we actually have two different systems mainly
we have committed to one or the other so we have a server system just for kind of internal management stuff and then we have a another system that our our quality was putting all there in a separate area not exactly the most efficient Pro way to do things but where all of our procedures were stored the reason there was the first one because that's how it started in the company and then the second one was so that we could put it on all the computers cuz cloud-based so that all employees could see
the procedures if they if they needed to but there's no specific ones it's just you have to come up with a plan it's only semi familiar with ISO a0001 can you speak to how you maintain revision control using Steelhead we've had some trouble in the past with revision control on what blueprints from customers customers are you know their part numbers might be the same but they're updating revisions and they might have different specifications for different revisions most of the time for us is it's
it's it's a different part number so like they'll get they'll they'll include like the Rev a or rev B in the part number and so then we just put it in as a separate part number that's how we've dealt with it does anybody else have a solution you just have to make sure you have a procedure that says specifically if you're getting a print from a customer and they have a new R you have to have a procedure that says if we get a new rev print we have to dispose of the previous Rev and replace it with
the new rev then you have to have somebody in the organization that it's their responsibility that they carry out that procedure and that's that's essentially meets the requirement of it that's how we do it well it it always seemed pretty simple to me to have steelhead put a REV and then a blank spot so you just have part number rev just within the part card that way you wouldn't have to invent a new part number every time you have a new revision like you're suggesting make sure you run the latest
but then have the traceability to see what all the past revisions were yeah basically a new revision creates a new part card that's somehow linked to the Past part cards but I mean yeah no it's definitely possible I'll take a look at that I agree with what this gentleman just said about the revision we're like entering a new part we're having to do it every time kind of lose the genealogy of that part even go through revisions and then we're having to create the add a new recipe to it it's it's
really a whole new part right and so you know one of the things I had on my list for steel head to discuss was how to handle revisions but also we have customers that don't have part numbers and they just send us miscellaneous Parts what I like to see some logic in Steelhead that if we enter let's say the XYZ axis of a part because we enter the dimensions of the parts in order to do the the sizing for how many parts can fit in the volume of a tank or or material type or just general information
and if Steelhead sees hey there's seven parameters that equal another part in the database identical and it pops up with a query you say hey there's another it's just a duplicate part because what happens is we're entering duplicate Parts when it comes to miscellaneous and there's no part number right so that's a waste of time so I like to see some in steelhead to look for that logic when it sees there's these data parameters these entry points in the in the actual work order that matches another
part identically the question whether it's a duplicate part so I think that'd be a great new feature functionality you don't think it's better in that case to push back on those customers and require them that's what I do to do on the customer that's like the ABC's 2 give me a part number yeah we have those customers that are just you know they're Mom and Pop Shop they're maybe too deep right and they're they're just trying to get by so I'm looking at from their perspective as well no part number
no plating no I mean it if it's a big customer I'm going to question what the heck you doing right we have customers that have two 300 employees they should have something formally in place but I have customers who work out of the garage they're making you know 500,000 a year out of their garage okay so they're not going to go through that level and they don't require shirts either these customers so most of our customers do require certifications a lot of DOD Parts but we do a lot of mom and pop
stuff but I want do a lot of mom and pop stuff but I want do a lot of mom and pop stuff but I want to accommodate them but I also don't want to add to my overhead in administrative cost right so I if I have a solution to that it'll help them but I don't then have to put the burden on fixing their problem it's not really them I mean it's it's a mom and pop shop I want to help them I want to help them grow too but I also don't want to make it a burden on us understand yeah we we've actually had a
similar problem with the part number especially with new customers starting up we we've had to do some push back sometimes sometimes they just perpetually stay miscellaneous because it is just random Parts after that but a lot of times it's they they're prototyping something yeah and then they get part numbers after that once they decide which one they like we do have a lot of prototypes right y so you had mentioned that you were working with a previous company different Erp system and obviously
we're talking about qms 91 did you kind of have to rewrite your qms once you adapt the Steelhead Erp system I know that these guys are super flexible with what they do and how they do it to try and maybe kind of work within your boundaries of your current Qms system but just kind of wondering how that got handled when I say we worked with a a previous Erp system it was never production it never ran on its own that's the reason why we got rid of it yeah after a year and a half and three months of
my time being specific to it our owner just is like no this is not working found Steelhead I about rang his neck after he told me we're pulling the plug and then within 24 hours I was like okay we're good with I'm good with this but as far as the the the quality management so we were still doing paper and so with with steelhead all we did was upload our current NCR form with some modifications because some of it gets populated and then outside of that our qms actually just got better because of
Steelhead yeah before it was all paper thank you Josh [Applause]