Welcome to Spring

We hit 60 for the time this year today AND it didn't rain! The neighbors celebrated by bbq'ing this evening. It smelled wonderful. I had a colonoscopy Wednesday. My last solid food meal was Sunday evening. I was empty from stem to stern. The doc found 4 small polyps, nothing serious. Now I'm working on refilling my system. So many choices. That bbq made me hungry all over again even though I'd eaten an hour earlier. This weekend I'll crank up ours: burgers, maybe a pork tenderloin. Yum!

The SSQA audit it over. We hit our goal of 5.0 according to the auditors. They've turned their report into Applied Materials who have to review it, approve it and flip the switch in their database changing us from "Conditional" to "Approved". Only then do I get to stop filling out first article reports on a sampling of every shipment we send them. I've had to do it so often that it's almost routine. A routine Chinese fire drill every couple of weeks, more often towards the end of the month. Lots of extra paperwork.

And the fun never stops: we have another customer audit the beginning of May. This is the one that hit us shortly after the last SSQA audit in August. He ended up writing us up saying in effect "what ever they have to do for SSQA, that goes for us too". He was happy with the copy of the roadmap we were using to track all the things we were doing for SSQA. He should be happy with the state of our Quality Systems too. All we have to do is keep all the things we started going strong. It gets me up in the mornings and makes the days go quick.

On the weekends I've been giving driving lessons to the grandson. He's moved from practicing in my truck (an automatic) to learning to drive a stick shift in the Rav4. It's surprisingly forgiving. He's got the basics down. Now it's a matter of practice, practice and more practice. He's a freshman in high school and made the baseball team as a "swing" player between the varsity and the Freshman or "B" teams. That means he get's to travel and suit up for the varsity games and even play some if and when they get 20 runs ahead. Don't laugh, it happened this week. He got to play a little first base. I'll hear all about it when we're out on the road Saturday morning. Troy visits with P while we're out driving around. It's a good time to hash out the problems of the world.

It smells like "wet dog" around here

It was drizzling for both dog walks this weekend. Now that I'm working again the boys really look forward to the weekend, probably more so than I do. The official start of spring is just around the corner and the temperature has finally climbed back to normal: low 50's. A very humid low 50's. The cold weather (and extra rain) has been great up on the mountain. There will be skiing until May, perhaps even June this year. Too bad I'm not one who enjoys that sort of thing. Much too cold for my blood.

We had our ISO audit last week. It went well. The auditor has been auditing the company for the last 1o years or so. He knew more about some aspects of the company that I or my boss did. Between the two of us we have less than a years experience at this company. The auditor found a couple minor things in the procedures for us to fix. Not bad at all. The real challenge starts tomorrow: two auditor will spend the next three days looking over everything we've been doing since they were here six months ago. They left a list of 41 "Opportunities for Improvement" we've been working on since then. The audit is based on about 120 questions in a 15 categories. They score us on a 10 point scale in 4 aspects of each category. Last time we scored just over a 3 in the key areas and 3.6 overall. We have to get that up to a 5 overall. Right now we are a "Conditionally Approved" supplier that has to submit first article samples tested by a third party every time we ship them parts. A lot of extra time, effort and paperwork. We move to "Approved" when we achieve a 5 over all. We have come a long way in the last four months. The question is: have we come far enough? Even if we have, they will be back in a year to do it again. By then we'll have to get our overall score up to at least 5.5. All this for less than 20% of our business. Don't get me wrong, all this is a good thing for our operation, it is something we should do/ would have done sooner or later. It helps with other customer audits too. The SSQA (Standardized Supplier Quality Assessment) audit usually cover 90% or more of what other customer look for in a supplier quality system. It's just that having to do it in a crash effort in six months is pretty stressful.

Once we get past the audit, I'm scheduled for a routine colonoscopy at the end of the month. The fun just never stops around here...