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ISO 9001 By Mary McDonald marymcd@mcdcg.com
Making Progress is Better Than Not Starting
n the last issue, we talked about tackling ISO requirements, one small step at a time. In this issue, let’s talk about what happens in the midst of implementing – you begin to make progress. Let’s say you want to retrain all your forklift operators in 2015. You’re going to do a rolling schedule – retrain a few at a time, several times during the year. Now imagine we pop in for a visit, and ask how your training is going. You can answer one of three ways: • We’re almost done • We’ve barely started • We’re making progress
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They all indicate that you’ve started the project, but not yet finished; however, the first is the “glass half full” answer; the sec- ond is the “glass half empty” answer; and the third simply let’s us know that you’re in the midst of implementing but it’s not yet complete.
I’ll give you an example from my per- sonal life – here in the hot housing mar- ket of Austin, we sold our home to the first people who walked through – and they wanted to close within thirty days! Since we had yet to a) find a home to
move into, and b) pack up all our world- ly belongings, it was a tall order! As a result, we found a (smaller) home, hired movers who packed everything in boxes (and not in the order we’d pack it in – nothing broke, but…) and we moved in and literally stacked our two car garage floor-to-ceiling with the extra “stuff” that would not fit into the existing rooms. Ever since then, we’ve been working on emptying boxes. Every weekend, we make progress. Some weekends it seems over- whelming; other weekends, we feel a sense of accomplishment (can you relate to that feeling yourself?). But in all cases, we are making progress. We can extrapolate this now to imple-
menting ISO. How are you doing on get- ting a grasp of your metrics? Training your folks? Reducing returns due to yard error? If you’ve identified just one thing that you can focus on to help you with these issues (understand your costs or inventory better; spend more time train- ing in areas that are prone to human error; double check orders prior to ship- ment), you’re making progress. It doesn’t matter if it’s one thing on a list of three, or one on a list of three hundred – if you’re working on it, and getting some traction, you’re making progress. Whether you decide you never want to implement a standard, or you want to go and get registered internationally, I’ll encourage you to find one thing to work on, and start working on it. Start making progress.
Stumped on where to start, how to begin, what to work on first? Email me at marymcd@mcdcg.com and I’ll be glad to chat with you, at no charge, to figure out where you can get the biggest bang for the buck. We call this the #NoExcuses call – you have no excuse not to start, as you can get expert advice at no cost. What could be easier than that?
Mary McDonald is the CEO/CTO of The Mc- Donald Consulting Group since 1995, working to help clients improve processes to positively affect the bottom line. She is a Certified Qual-
ity Auditor and a RABQSA Certified Lead Auditor in several standards, as well as an author and speaker on systems integration and strategic business planning.
18 Automotive Recycling | March-April 2015