How to make your ISO Auditor Smile; And Make Your Professional Life Much Easier

Jordan had a conversation with a TeamPage customer in Sweden who agreed to document and publish a TeamPage case study, but the ISO auditor story is too good to wait. The customer is small precision machined products manufacturer. They initially supplied prototypes to the Swedish defense industry, but now focus on precision products for heavy vehicle manufacturers.

The company is ISO/TS 16 949 certified for Quality Management, ISO 14 001 certified for Environmental Management, and rightly proud of their reputation for producing high quality products and close cooperation with their customers. They use TeamPage for their Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) process and Product Part Approval Process (PPAP). When the conversation took place, they had moved 90% of their procedures and shop floor work instructions from Microsoft Word to TeamPage. This gave everyone in the company live access to TeamPage procedures, for quick reading, search, moderated editing, ECO, and issue tracking from concept to shop floor.

Then the ISO auditor paid a visit:

"We had an audit last week and because we have incorporated about 90% of our procedures in TeamPage and also having the output from them in TeamPage our auditor was freakin' ecstatic. I demoed the 'Add' button for sections and a template article and I see his jaw drop. Pretty funny to see, these guys are very seldom impressed.

We also use TeamPage for work instructions read/used mainly by 40 machine operators. We also post news about new work instructions and change information on updated ones.

Earlier the same day the auditor came to see us we received a customer complaint. That is serious stuff in our line of business. I wrote an 'Quality Alert' in TeamPage (based on a template) and in this particular Quality Alert there were a few things that the operator needed to do and inspect so that we are again able to supply parts within customer specifications.

The auditor picked-up on this immediately when he arrived. I showed him the procedure written in TeamPage, the Quality Alert in TeamPage and the updated work instructions in TeamPage. He said “Good, but have you talked to the operators?” and I said “No, I don't need to. I would have but I have been to busy preparing for this audit”. He walked directly to the machining area and started interrogating operators. I was grinning, he looked surprised. It was amazing. All operators knew exactly what they were supposed to be doing, the information distribution and the Quality Alert simply worked. It always works.

• Thank you Traction Software for making my professional life so much easier."

You're very welcome!

The quotes are from our Quality Manager contact (used with permission), writing in that company's space on Traction Software's TeamPage server. A company space is used to work with Traction Software folk privately, versus posts made to one of the Forum spaces shared by all TeamPage customers, friends, and Traction Software employees.

See TeamPage Solutions: Quality Management

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