Learn how The Will-Burt Company was able to implement and adopt a new quality management system across 8 collaborating teams in less than a day and streamline internal / supplier non-conformances, customer complaints (VOCs), internal / supplier audits, 8D reporting, corrective actions and preventive actions.
“Through Unifize we are already showing that our average time to closure is now 7.2 days, that’s a 75% improvement!”
Director of Quality
The Will-Burt Company is an employee-owned, 350 person manufacturer for the military, communications, commercial construction, general fabrication, and aerospace segments. The company is over 100 years old and does approximately $100m in revenues. In addition to their headquarters in Orrville, Ohio, they also have a number of subsidiaries in the US, UK, Germany and Singapore.
Will-Burt manufactures telescopic towers, mobile command centers, integrated trailers, light towers, and storage equipment for the US military, border patrol, oil & gas, marine, telecom, and broadcast industries. Their customers include companies like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin & BAE Systems.
Apart from maintaining ISO 9001:2015 and AS9100 certifications, they also have to comply with a variety of other external standards given the high expectations and diversity of their customer base. Since they supply to the US defense sector, Will-Burt is also ITAR compliant.
In 2017, the Will-Burt leadership decided to upgrade their quality management systems from a variety of home grown Excel sheets and in-house databases. Their existing system had become cumbersome and painful to manage. Specifically, they faced the following problems:
Ultimately, they were unable to meet their continuous improvement objectives as an organisation, increasing the risk of unhappy customers and the cost of rejected or reworked product and materials.
“One of the major issues we faced was with ownership and accountability…for example, a non-conformance would get written and be distributed to everyone on email….basically everyone on the email became the owners, which meant the no-one was the owner.”
Tedd Carr, Will-Burt’s Director of Quality, spent two years researching over 30 of the most popular eQMS systems on Capterra, G2 Crowd and extensive Google searches. Tedd ultimately found all the solutions he evaluated be ‘too complex, too boilerplate, or too expensive’.
He was introduced to Unifize late in 2019 and quickly realized that it would be a better fit than anything he had evaluated for the following reasons:
In March 2020, The Will-Burt Company went live with over 90 people in the organisation to manage the following processes: internal / supplier non-conformances, customer complaints (VOCs), internal / supplier audits, 8D reporting, corrective actions and preventive actions.
The results were almost instantaneous. By using Unifize, The Will-Burt Company was able to:
Reduce quality process cycle times by 75% in less than 30 days
Implement & adopt in less than 1 day with no involvement from the IT team
Achieve single point accountability across 8 collaborating teams
Increase engagement on quality processes from 5 people to 90+ people
Increase visibility into 6 core quality processes by bringing everything into 1 place
Reduce face-to-face interactions on internal audits by 95%
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