23.2 The Certification Plan from the Ground Floor Up

23.2 The Certification Plan from the Ground Floor Up

Mike did as he promised and sat down at his desk that Saturday morning and began to write the hindsight approach to ISO 9001:2000 that he would deliver to Paul over those few beers. He would fax the plan to Paul and Sam in advance for their review and concepts.

The plan would be somewhat difficult to write because he would have to integrate the ground-floor approach that Growth had taken for the ISO 9001: 1994 version with the upgrade approach necessary for the ISO 9001:2000 version. As a result, he pulled out the ISO 9001:1994 records—about a three-foot-high pile of files—arranged the upgrade files along side the others and started to type into his computer. He decided to use a flow diagram for clarity. His work is shown in the flow chart labeled Figure 23.1.

Figure 23.1: Mike's ground-floor plan to achieve ISO 9001—2000 for FastBoard.

The Results Paul did receive a waiver from the OEM and won one of three prototype contracts as part of a runoff for the production contract. The ambitious certification program that Paul and Sam put together based on Mike's flow chart led to an ISO 9001:2000 certificate two months before the production RFQ was received. This was a little close, but it was in plenty of time for FastBoard to submit and win 80% of the manufacturing award. The win established FastBoard as a player with the larger OEMs.

When Mike and Paul did get together, it turned out that Paul had married a woman that had been in his MBA class. Mike had married his high school sweetheart, had four kids, and his wife was a fashion artist that Paul's wife thought was the greatest pen-and-ink artist in the country.

Certification for FastBoard took 9 months. The major difference between Growth and FastBoard was that FastBoard celebrated with wine and cheese. As a matter of fact, FastBoard was different in another way. They didn't stuff the place with huge cookies like Growth; they used tons of cola. Either way, they were really high-energy people.