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Raymond Industrial Equipment Ltd. : ISO 9001 A relentless emphasis on quality assurance and continuous improvement led Raymond Industrial Equipment Ltd., Brantford, Ontario, to seek certification to standard ISO 9001. "There was no real pressure on us. Our interest in process control came first. We have been seeking to better understand and control our processes, and ISO 9001 certification grew naturally out of that," said James S. Locker, Raymond Industrial's vice president and general manager. Locker and the 400 employees of the 140,000 square foot Brantford plant were confident that ISO 9001 certification could be no more demanding that the customers who have made Raymond a dominant player in the design and manufacture of electric reach trucks and walkies for the narrow-aisle forklift market. They also recognize that having a world class quality assurance program and being able to prove it can be two very different things. ISO 9000 certification provides a verifiable answer, accepted worldwide to the question, "What is quality?" The process takes up to 18 months at a registration cost of $5000 to $15,000, according to Quality Management Institute (QMI), Raymond's auditor and North America's leading third-party ISO 9000 registrar. Some companies seek the help of outside consultants to achieve ISO 9001 certification, but Raymond handled the process entirely in-house. The ISO 9001 registration process begins with a checklist covering 20 sections that categorize quality principles in four major areas: management leadership and involvement, quality system support, process management and control, and process and system improvement. It includes review of the company's quality manual and an on-site audit of the facility. Total Traceability/Accountability of Every Process ISO 9001 requires that records of identification and traceability of every product be carefully maintained. That's a difficult challenge without the documentation capability provided by OnTrack from Real World Technology, the leading supplier of Windows NT-based Manufacturing Execution Systems developed to improve manufacturing profitability. "Traceability is one of the critical components of process control. Traceability also ensures a significantly higher degree of personal accountability. When you combine these two elements, quality is automatically raised to much higher levels," Locker said. "Real World Technology's OnTrack software helps us do things better, smarter, and at lower cost. In fact they go together. OnTrack gives us traceability and accountability. It also gives us interactivity, so that we can monitor, change and improve the process when and as required. And we didn't have to create a bureaucracy to achieve this level of documentation. It's electronic, so there's no paperwork. Documenting Notification of Engineering Changes Documentation is the key to maintaining and demonstrating a system for process control, according to Locker. Since 1994, Raymond has relied on OnTrack, which they use to automate the delivery of production schedules, to provide shop floor documentation electronically, and to automate the collection of product quality data. ISO places a strong emphasis on producing evidence that specified quality requirements are fulfilled. That is one area where the documentation capabilities of OnTrack gave Raymond a decided advantage. For example, the ISO 9001 standard requires that the design system include procedures for reviewing and adjusting the design and development system as r4equired by specified circumstances. To meet the standard, Raymond had to show how all design changes are identified, documented, reviewed and approved by authorized personnel before implementation. All this information is captured electronically by OnTrack. The OnTrack system is integrated seamlessly with the MAPICS business system and the CADAM computer aided design (CAD) system so that users have - at their fingertips - all of the information they require to perform their jobs. Users can tap in from virtually anywhere and find out the status of an order the latest process instructions and drawings, and the job order sequence established by MRP II scheduling. If an engineering change occurs which affects the process, manufacturing engineering changes the process instructions and enters the effective date. By means of a change in the header bar color on the screen, the operator is signaled electronically that a change has occurred. The color change remains in effect for 10 days. The accuracy and currency of all information are essential at Raymond because every lift truck in made-to-order, including customer options such as fork size, voltage, tire types, mast elevations, capacities and base leg opening. Open Architecture For Total Enterprise Integration OnTrack is a Windows NT-based client/server system providing the open architecture needed for total enterprise integration. The system automatically dispatches both order and process information. When a new sales order is entered, production control schedules the truck to be built on a specific day, and manufacturing engineering creates an electronic folder into which the correct process information is loaded. This job folder (really a collection of electronic files) contains both text and graphical work instructions for building component parts and assembling the finished truck. Additionally, quality-related, required data items that must be captured as part of the production process have been identified or preset and assembled in the folder. The operator interacts with OnTrack by entering critical quality data for each truck/part number combination before he or she can move to the next job. Author: Laura Carrabine |