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For small shops with big customers
Your customers want a quality system, and the paperwork lands on you
Your biggest customer wants you to be ISO 9001 or AS9100 certified. Now there's a quality manual to keep up, forms to fill in, records to file and a scramble before every audit, all done by the people who also make the parts.
Sound familiar?
- A customer you can't afford to lose asked for it, and nobody in your shop has written a quality manual before.
- There's a form for everything now, and someone has to fill it in, sign it and file it.
- Calibration dates, training records and signed travelers are spread across clipboards, folders and somebody's desk.
- Before every audit, the shop stops to hunt for the small stuff: a missing signature, a record nobody can find.
What it costs you
- Hours go to forms, logs and sign-offs instead of quotes, programs and parts.
- The paperwork falls on the owner or one key person, who already has a full day.
- Audit prep turns into a scramble, and jobs on the floor wait while it happens.
- When the one person who knows where the records live is out, nobody else can find them.
Why it keeps happening
- You don't have a full-time quality person, so the paperwork goes to whoever has a spare hour.
- Records get made on the floor, in the office and at the inspection bench, and they rarely end up in one place.
- The quality manual gets written once, then drifts as people, machines and jobs change.
- Nobody on the floor got into this work to fill out forms, so the forms wait until someone asks.
Common questions
Why does quality paperwork take so much time in a small shop?
Because the people who make, check and ship the parts are the same people filling in the forms and keeping the records. The paperwork gets done in between, and it backs up whenever the shop gets busy.
Do you help us get certified?
No. That's between you, your customer and your registrar. On the call, we stick to the paperwork itself: who does it, where it lives and why it piles up.
Are you a quality consultant?
No, and I'm not a registrar either. I don't write quality manuals, run audits or tell anyone what a standard asks for.
What exactly do you build?
It depends on how you work today; we figure that out on the call.
Related shop bottlenecks
See all shop bottlenecks, or go back to the home page.
Tell me who keeps your quality records
Chasing down signatures and hunting for records is busywork, the kind that can now come off your team's plate. Every shop keeps its records its own way, so we talk it through first.
Book a time with me, Kevin Kirchner, and tell me which records take the most chasing and who ends up doing it the week before an audit.
