We have revamped our quality procedures to improve the way we work and provide better customer satisfaction.
We have always developed our systems in line with the ever changing standards and Attwater currently adopts and is accredited to the AS9100 Revision C aerospace system standard.
We never sit back on our laurels; our philosophy is one of “there is always room for improvement”. When we were recently presented with a new external auditor, one with a BSI background, he made us reconsider our existing documented quality system which gave us the impetus to develop and simplify things further.
This was an opportunity we grabbed, involving most of our staff to re-write more than 100 documents within the system. These are now simpler and we have also simplified and redefined our core processes – sales, planning, manufacturing and despatch and key processes such as finance and planning.
Quality director Dave Swarbrick says: “We’ve always looked to increase customer satisfaction with our products, service and systems and with the AS9100 standard behind us we can certainly achieve this.”
Gone are prescriptive procedures and instructions – the new style is a much more visual system, becoming more user-friendly and allowing us to work more efficiently.
Dave adds: “The new process documentation shows the overall system in straight forward diagrams, images and charts. These are easily understood and systems can evolve readily within this structure. Whilst we still monitor what’s going on in our manufacturing and sales processes it helps us to be absolutely clear about our process outcomes.
“In a nutshell, this evolving process based system means further simplification of documentation, which is far easier to understand and change. It’s going to help us to be more efficient, improve our customer satisfaction, and it’s making internal and external auditing much easier, too.”
