Want to know how we leverage AS9100 iso certification to ensure continual improvement for our work-holding devices?

  
Hey guys, it's Rick at Elijah Tooling. 
Give me two. 
I will make it worth your while. 
Today, I'm standing in front of our shipping tables. I'm in the shipping department. And I want to talk to you about a concept that we came up with several years ago, which we call - the kitchen chef. I'm not the kitchen chef, but I'm going to act like the kitchen chef today. 
Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “I thought they were a manufacturing business?”. You're absolutely right! We are. We do workholding that allows repeatable, precise, rapid setups. So, why do we need a kitchen chef? 
Well, the term came - we kind of borrowed it; from Cheesecake Factory. And what Cheesecake Factory does; is they have a person that they assign this task, which is to look at every single plate before it goes out to the customer. They look at it, they check to make sure what's on the plate is exactly what the customer ordered, and they check to see whether it's the right thing. In essence, this is a type of quality assurance. 
Well, we thought that was a great idea! So, even though we don't have a kitchen or a chef, we do have a KC. And so, today I'm just going to kind of very rapidly go through some of the steps that our KC does. And, I would like to - I hope, give you a sense of the security that you can get by working with us. 
You're going to get the order that you made because we're double-checking things as we go along. Now, another element to this, another layer, is that we're ISO certified. Actually, AS9100 certified. Which is a certification for aerospace type suppliers. So, it's another designation - a little bit higher on the totem pole, as far as that type of certification. But, regardless - this plays a role, because with the AS9100 if you have returns you have to say, ‘why’ they were returned? You have to make it a problem for the organization that has to be solved. 
In our case, this is how we solve the problem before it ever became a problem. So, we've got an order here; it's getting ready to go out. We've marked out the names, of course. We're not going to disclose who's getting this order. But, what we do; is we go, and we look at this work order. 
First of all, the certificate of compliance it's right here. It's been stamped on the administrative side. What that means - is somebody reviewed the purchase order, and when they were inputting the work order, they made sure that it complied. So, you can see the signature here, and the date. And then, the kitchen chef is going just to go down the list and determine whether everything is as it should be. 
So for example, this is a tube of our workholding fasteners. She or he is going to take a look and go: Okay. They're not looking at the tube, by the way, they're looking at the part. What's the part? What's the number on the part? Ah, that matches the name on my sheet. Excellent. Excellent.
So, we can also check the instruction sheets, do they match? Is this the instruction sheet that goes with that fastener? So, then, of course, we're going to count. In this case, we count by 5. So, our tubes are 5. So you can see there's about 500 there. Actually, It's not about because.... ah there's the number. Check, we got exactly 500 there. And then, in this particular order, we've got another - we've got six screw kits that are going out. I don't see them, but –  ‘ah’ another box and in the box, screw kits. Now, you can see that another feature of our shipping is that we are more than happy to label these things as our customers specify. So, they get to the right departments or wherever they're going inside your plant. 
Of course, the added bonus of candy. You know, we have lots of people that love that about us, and we love doing it. Anyway, so we've checked down this list. We've also checked the shipping documents; in this particular case - we're going out of the country. So, there's another set of documents that are involved. 
International, of course. And so, we go down the list; we check the parts that are on it. Check the quantities. We check the specific item. And then, we have this beautiful stamp. When you receive the product from us - you're going see a packing list that has this stamp on it. Which means that says- AS9100 Rev. D certified and approved. 
So, I'm going to signature it. I'm going to put today's date on it. You're going to see that on every order that you receive from us. And then, we also have the certificate compliance. Of course, we had it on our work order. We've already approved this. But, now the kitchen chef is going to verify that this is in conformance to the work order and the work order's in compliance with the purchase order. So, we're going to signature that and put the date here. 
Now, and only now is our order ready to go. Well, I hope that that's been instructive for you. We're trying to be an organization of excellence. So, you never have a problem with our products or our orders. Ever. 
Till next time. 
 Rick Miller, 
-Elijah Tooling 
 

AS9100 Certification. AS9100 is a company level certification by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) titled "Quality Systems-Aerospace-Model for Quality Assurance in Design, Development, Production, Installation, and Servicing".