It is perhaps the least conspicuous and most important display in the office. Among the racks of impressive copper and steel pipe pieces, the corporate art work and the staff’s personal paraphernalia is perhaps the most prized possession: A small framed certificate with the lettering “ISO 9002.”
“You can shout it from the rooftops that you’re great and wonderful, but unless somebody independent comes in and tells you you’re doing everything you say you’re doing, and will certify it, it really doesn’t mean anything,” says Edward R. Waters, vice president and director of operations of Merit Brass.
Now when Merit Brass shouts, there is something tangible to back up its boasts. The process has been a long one for the Richmond Heights-based piping products manufacturer, with the expected occasional bump along the way. But the brass at Merit Brass wouldn’t have it any other way.
“We were a little bit naïve about exactly what the commitment was going to require,” says Alan Lipp, vice president and director of sales and marketing. “We developed an attitude: We’ll do these things, but not to fly a flag out front that says ‘ISO 9002.’ We want to make sure through the measurement techniques that we’ve embodied here over the last 10 years that the payback is there, that we’re not doing it just to keep up with the Joneses.”
Explains Waters, “There are always a lot of people outside the company and inside the company that are going to be detractors, who say (the certification) doesn’t necessarily produce a good product or service. That is true. You can write procedures that wouldn’t mandate that you come out with a good service or a good product.
“That was something that we kept in mind. When all was said and done, this project wasn’t to create paperwork … this project was to create efficiencies.”
The toughest point to get across, Waters says, was “selling it to our own internal people that this project was going to be theirs. They were going to own it and we were going to come out with a better Merit Brass, as opposed to just bringing something to market.”
From a company perspective, Merit Brass, which achieved ISO certification in June of last year, the entire process has been approached with an eye on the bottom line.
“We are still in a commodity industry,” Waters says. “The critical part of our ISO implementation was not to market it. The critical part was to make our company more efficient — to continue to reduce costs and continue to make our customers happy.”
As they went through the ISO process, Merit Brass execs recognized a number of avenues to check productivity and efficiency on the company’s 26 product groups encompassing about 8,000 SKUs. One measure of nonconformance is error rates for 10,000 line items. The rate has dropped continually for the past four years. In 1996, there were 87.1 errors per 10,000 line items. In 1997, there were 65.9; in 1998, 46.3; and in 1999, 44.2, a 49 percent improvement.
“The whole concept of ISO 9002 is continuous improvement,” Waters says. “That is the overriding umbrella for ISO 9002. Every time that (auditor) QMI comes in here, if we were doing everything exactly the way we were doing it six months ago, they may say to us that’s a nonconformance — you haven’t continued to improve.
“Every error is tracked and then assigned to the responsible department, the responsible person, so that everybody knows exactly how they’re doing and how they compare to their peers within the company.”
That’s changed the way Merit Brass management filters information down to its employees, Lipps says.
“We’ve taken subjectivity out of measuring bad news,” he says. “We don’t try to belittle people that are continuously making the same errors, but we do make them aware of it. We measure by department as well.”
There have been a few surprises. With the immediate nature of today’s communication, Merit stopped issuing sales contracts. Now, an order is called in or faxed to the office. By the time it’s put together on a sheet and mailed out, “We would hope that the order has already been received and put away, so we kind of eliminated that step,” Waters says.
But that’s not good enough for ISO, which requires a sales contract. So, after a little brainstorming, the company came up with a system to use a fax program to send a copy of the order confirmation, price and quantity. Any changes must be made within two hours or the sales contract will be accepted as final.
“Two things have happened,” Waters says. “No. 1, it’s probably the single most recurring remark we hear in the field: Customers love it. We save them from making mistakes and ourselves from making mistakes, which are very costly.
“The second thing that’s happened is we’ve noted that some direct competitors and other people within the industry have copied it. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, it was really probably the single most positive attribute experienced by our customers.” How to reach: Merit Brass, (216) 261-9800 or (800) 726-9880, or at www.meritbrass.com
Dan Jacobs ([email protected]) is senior editor at SBN magazine.