The Quality Life

So obviously I haven’t been keeping up with this blog. Of course, my wife hasn’t been keeping up hers…and my daughters haven’t been keeping up theirs…I guess the blogosphere ain’t what it used to be.

Since the last time I posted, however, my life in quality has been busy. The facility in which I work is seeking to obtain certification to build products for the automotive market.  Having been registered to ISO 9000 for several years, the plant originally thought it wouldn’t be too difficult to slip over to the ISO 16949 automotive standard.

Silly company.

In addition to the ISO 16949, we also have to meet the German automotive standard, VDA 6.3. The difference is that third parties audit and cerrtify a company to the ISO standard–and you pay them to do so. But the VDA standard is used by the automotive customers themselves when they audit.

So in April we had our first VDA audit, and did better than we might have done, but were really raked over the coals. We followed that with our first official ISO 16949 audit, and did very well, thank you. Two weeks later, a major American supplier to the car companies spent a couple of days with us using their own checklist, and left happy, as well.

So my three month sabbatical hasn’t been wasted. I’ll try to get back to more timely interjections.