The world's leading manufacturer of protective products for automotive, marine and recreational vehicles has achieved IATF 16949 and ISO 9001 certifications
The American Covercraft won two certifications related to the Quality Management System - IATF 16949 and ISO 9001, in three units of the Group, in less than 12 months of project, with the support of the SoftExpert EQM solution, aimed at managing business quality.
Headquartered in Pauls Valley – Oklahoma and with units in California, Colorado, Montana, South Carolina, Texas and Texas, in the USA, in addition to the city of Mexicali, in the State of Baja California, Mexico, Covercraft has more than a thousand employees. The company specializes in custom automotive covers, with a portfolio of 300,000 models, including in-house and licensed production from brands such as Barrett-Jackson, Carhartt, Ford, Major League Fishing and Winnebago.
In the last five years, the company has registered substantial growth, mainly due to the acquisitions of business units such as ADCO, Carver Industries, GT Covers and Marathon Seat Covers. According to Covercraft's Quality director, Roby Potts, with the expansion, the company began to have difficulties to manage all the processes in an organized way and went looking for a global software in the market. “We were looking for a solution that could be applied to all our units and managed centrally.”
Potts explains that the tool was chosen mainly because it is a modular and scalable platform, allowing the standardization of business activities and meeting the requirements that regulate the sector, at the speed that the company needed. “After three months of implementation at the Texas and Oklahoma plants, we had already automated the processes at the Mexico unit, where the system perfectly met the bilingual document control requirements. The solution is highly configurable and in a short time allowed us to exercise an excellent level of control over the organization, driving standardization in all plants”, he comments.
The system is used in the manufacturing and support areas, mainly for the management, delivery and control of documents, ensuring compliance with automotive industry standards, such as IATF 16949 – an international quality management system standard for the segment. The company's Quality team is also using the solution to manage action plans, with the implementation of corrective and preventive actions, as well as to conduct changes and audits, increasing the agility and robustness of the Quality Management System.
Another benefit highlighted by Potts is that, with the structuring and documentation of operational processes, the manufacturing units were able to replicate the management model without the need to develop local work instructions. “Our main gain, without a doubt, was the IATF 16949 certification in two of our facilities and the ISO 9001 certification in our factory in Mexico”, he reinforces.
The company's next challenges now are to automate processes in two other factories over the next three months, release the newly developed change management workflow, and implement the APQP component, which will help the organization ensure simple and effective control. in the development of new products.
