Progressive Tool Achieves ISO Quality Certification

Jeff Garrett holds a lock pin
display head in a forceps prior
to placing it in a CNC lathe.

Examples of precision work at Progressive Tool. Scale at right
is in millimetres on top and 64ths of an inch on the bottom.

By Michael Meador

"It’s clear to me that without ISO certification, we couldn’t move forward -- we’d be dead in the water."

That’s a pretty strong statement from the plant manager of a successful company that has been in business since 1956, but Patrick Crowley is adamant that Progressive Tool Company has to live up to its name in order to insure its current sales are sustained, as well as to exploit opportunities for growth.

Progressive Tool is located in Endwell, NY and serves the aerospace, military and commercial markets with a variety of precision CNC machining services. The company was started by Gordon and Elizabeth Markoff and is currently under the direction of their son, Ronald Markoff, President.

Following a couple of decades of providing a range of traditional machine shop services, increasing demand for computers created opportunities for the company to make non-electronic computer system components. Crowley explained that as computing equipment grew increasingly smaller, the industry demanded ever-shrinking machined parts, so Progressive Tool began specializing in production of small parts that other companies didn’t want to make.

Crowley said that the company’s competitive advantages center around providing precision workmanship and prompt service to customers who require specialized parts in small to medium volumes, sometimes even single-piece orders. These parts are produced with 40 state-of-the- art mills and lathes, including a 5-axis machining center as well as many conventional cutting machines.

Another company strength is low employee turnover. Crowley, who has been with company since 1967, said that most employees are long-term. "These are people who have been able to evolve and expand their skills as production tolerances have tightened and the technologies we use have become more complex."

"You have to have people who have the vision to acquire the specialized equipment necessary to produce our bread and butter services -- creating tiny machined parts with +-0.001 inch tolerances. We still do larger parts as we’ve done for decades, but now we do more smaller and smaller parts that are more and more precise. We’ve had to diversify to keep the business healthy."

The original motivation for the company to focus on quality management systems came from the need to meet the requirements of MIL-I-45208A, which establishes specifications that pertain to the inspection and tests necessary to substantiate product conformance to drawings, specification, and other contact requirements.

Additional quality assurance programs were established in response to requirements of an expanding customer base. Most of these larger customers would deploy their own staff for site audits in order to insure that Progressive Tool was adequately addressing each customer’s unique quality requirements.

Crowley said that in recent years, those customers have been simplifying their operations by reducing or eliminating direct audits of their vendors, and also by trimming the number of vendors that are considered qualified to bid. "For example, one customer cut their list of qualified vendors from over 1,000 to 135, and then again to 85. It became apparent that having your quality system certified by a third party would be essential to remaining on those lists."

So the company’s management decided to pursue AS9100 certification, which is an aerospace industry standard that is a superset of the ISO 9001:2008 requirements. Bob Mann from AM&T reviewed the company’s existing quality system, assessed what else needed to be done to prepare for the certification process, created a plan to make it happen, and provided assistance and guidance until the company was ready for audit by a third party.

This process was interrupted by the 2011 flood that filled the entire plant with water up to the window sills. Crowley explained that the flood recovery effort pushed the quality systems work to the back burner, but that their customers were understanding and were willing to postpone the deadlines for their QMS requirements.

Subsequently, the managers conferred with Mann and decided it was in the company’s best interest to go for ISO 9001:2008 registration instead of AS9100. ""It was hard for us to get started, but Ron and I made a big push, and with lots of help from Bob we made it a priority. You have to really keep after it to put the procedures in place to get certified."

Last fall, Progressive Tool passed the registration audit and achieved ISO certification. Within two days, a large customer told Crowley that he would be releasing several purchase orders that had been on hold because the orders were dependent on the company becoming ISO certified.

Crowley said that one result of being an ISO 9001:2008 company is that Progressive Tool is now getting RFQs from several customers who had previously considered the company as being unqualified just due to the absence of that certification.

He explained other benefits: "Following ISO standards has helped us to reliably create documents and records that keep things from falling through the cracks. It doesn’t make us perfect, but at least now we know when something falls through the cracks we can quickly find it and fix it."

"The kind of information that we’re getting from our QMS helps us be on board with the big companies; it’s in line with what the big companies want to know about the work we’re doing for them. Things like delivery schedule adjustments or any problems with jobs -- what they’re flowing down to us and what we are pushing up to them makes more sense to everyone concerned."

In addition to following the ISO standard and the MIL-I-45208A specification, Progressive Tool meets the calibration system requirements of MIL-STD-45662, and utilizes Statistical Process Controls (SPC) and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).

For more information visit Progressive Tool on the web at www.progressivetool.com

See this and other newsletter articles at http://amt-mep.org/files/1613/8989/6049/2014-01_Web.pdf

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