This edition of the Fastener Training Minute with Carmen Vertullo was originally published July 21, 2016 as “can stainless steel be magnetic?” during episode 107 of Fully Threaded Radio.
Well, hi everybody, it’s Carmen Vertullo with your Fastener Training Minute coming to you from Carver Engineering and Manufacturing, the Carver FACT Center here in San Diego and the Fastener Training Institute.
One of the questions that I often receive from my clients and others is how do I fill a position in my quality department? Sometimes they don’t even have a quality department, but they need to get a quality manager or an inspector up to speed in the fastener industry. It’s a difficult and challenging problem but there are some answers and then we return I’ll help you out with that.
Often times, when a supplier of fasteners needs to fill a position in their quality department, they look around the company and hopefully they can find someone from the inside the company to fill that position. But typically people who grow up in the fastener business don’t have the quality professional background that they need to be able to communicate with your customers and your vendors about quality issues.
There’s nothing worse that can happen in your company than when you have a rejection or a problem and your client has come to you with their quality professional from their ISO 9001:2015, and they’re talking all this quality lingo and you can’t talk back with them. You can’t speak the language of quality management, and you have kind of run into the quality management system Dragon. So you decide you need a quality professional. How do you find that person?
I have two solutions depending upon how much money you want to spend.
The first solution of course is to look within your company for a person who has the technical aptitude to be able to fill the position, whether it’s an inspector type position or a quality management position. Once you find that person, the important thing is that since they probably have a fastener background, the important thing is to get them trained in the discipline of quality management. You can do that in two ways. One way is you can hire somebody like me to help you get them up to speed in that area, and the other way is to get them associated with the ASQ the American Society for Quality. As a member, they can get help and have access to the information and training that they need to become a quality professional.
For the second solution, there are of course already trained and qualified quality engineers. You can spend a lot of money and find a quality engineer but chances are that that person is not going to have the fastener background. So if you find that type of person, you will need to bring them on board and get them up to speed quickly with fasteners. To do that, you can hire somebody like me to spend a few hours or a few days, whatever it takes to get them acquainted with the fastener industry.
So don’t despair, it is difficult to fill a position and you can look at it from two perspectives: find somebody from the outside that has a quality background in terms of profession and bring them up to speed with fasteners, or find somebody within your own company or in the faster industry that has the faster background and then bring them up to speed in the quality discipline.
I can help you with either of those and there is an article on my website at CarverEM.com or CarverFACT.com. Either one of those websites will get you to us and you can find out my perspective on how to bring on a professional-quality person into your fastener supply organization.
Thanks for listening. This has been Carmen Vertullo with the Fastener Training Minute.