The Attivo Blog

As a compliance consultant, I obviously believe that I provide truly unique and special value to my clients and prospects deciding to pursue ISO 9001 certification.  But one major advantage that I have, even over a very experienced and knowledgeable Quality Manager that's trying to go it alone from within his/her own company; is the commitment that top management has made to do what their consultant tells them. After all, "they're paying the big bucks", so usually the President or CEO has told everyone, "you WILL attend the training, you WILL meet your project deadlines, and we WILL get certified!" A compliant quality management system (QMS) is not rocket science, however; it is definitely a series of best practices and disciplines that often involves a [corporate] culture change. People that tend to resist change, either by their nature or because of the sheer habit of "we've always done it this way!" require the extra incentive or motivation that a top-down commitment fosters. So, if you're a company leader, don't "mail it in". You may have delegated the Quality Manager to be the Management Representative to develop your QMS, but your overt commitment and high expectations are imperative to your company's successful certification. A Personal Anecdote: After achieving ISO 9001 certification from within a company as Director of Quality and using the help of a consultant, I then left that company and joined the same consultant group and successfully prepared numerous clients to become certified, mostly in the Detroit area. Although the work was very rewarding, the excessive travel forced my decision to accept a full time position as the head of quality in a unionized manufacturing environment. The President himself did not support the effort to become truly compliant, yet he did want the ISO 9001 certificate. The short of it is that we never did get certified in the 18 months I was there. After deciding to leave that organization, I have since been involved again (very successfully) in preparing companies for ISO 9001 and AS 9100 certification, usually in under six months. Claude Cormane - "ISOMan"

Microsoft Convergence 2009 Conference - A Great Show! As a Microsoft Dynamics Partner, I recently traveled to New Orleans to participate in the annual Microsoft Convergence Conference.  It was well attended, with approximately 8,000-10,00 participants, which is pretty good for any such conference with all of the travel restrictions that companies have imposed in this dismal period for our economy.  Our blogging coach, Ron Ploof, (check him out at RonAmok.com) suggested I purchase one of those ultra-portable Flip Video cameras for use in creating video for the blog, so now you can check out the lunchroom scene of 10,000 attendees.
Many of you who know me as a "glass half full" kind of person, and I'm always looking for good news to pass on.  I was pleasantly surprised at this conference. The mood was very upbeat with everyone that I spoke with.  Not knowing much about the economy in that part of the country, I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that New Orleans and most of Louisiana is in pretty good economic shape, with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country.   Newscasts actually discussed how the state will hopefully dodge the bullet of recession for the most part.  I hope that is the case - Louisiana has surely seen enough trouble in recent years. I also had the opportunity to take a walking tour of the French Quarter one evening. While most of the area is quite charming, with great food and music, I would have enjoyed Bourbon Street a lot more when I was 22 years old.  The street is blocked off to traffic at night so people can freely walk around with a cocktail to visit the various bars and attractions - quite a party atmosphere.  Here's a good example of the Bourbon Street scene.
 
 Back to the conference.  Convergence is largely a user conference, although there were partner-only sessions a day earlier.  This is not the IT-focused conference where operating systems and development platforms are showcased.   Convergence is all about business applications - Dynamics GP (Great Plains), Dynamics AX (Axapta), NAV (Navision), SL (Solomon) and Microsoft CRM, as well as Sharepoint Services, Excel reporting, etc.  Lots of good product sessions, talking about new features and product roadmaps.  There was also a great learning lab, where you could speak with product specialists, and try out products 

Microsoft Convergence 2009 Learning Lab from Len Reo on Vimeo. I attended mostly Dynamics GP and CRM sessions.  There will be a service pack release for Dynamics GP Version 10 around mid-year, that dramatically improves the integration to CRM 4.0, which will certainly be welcomed.  Extender is also improved considerably, allowing addition of extensive additional data capture to fit unique requirments, in order entry, for example.  We were also given a glimpse of what's coming in Version 11 and beyond.  There is definitely no shortage of planned R & D investment in any of the Dynamics products, and there is no plan to consolidate their product offerings into one common platform or any such dramatic change. The trade show was huge - with approximately 200 third party vendors participating.  I knew lots of them already, since many of them support the Exact Software Macola products as well as the Intuit QuickBooks products.  You can solve ANY business problem with a Microsoft solution, I am convinced.  I was very impressed with the level of solutions available.  A good example is Data Masons Vantage Point EDI, whose product we work with for Dynamics customers as well as Exact Software and Intuit QuickBooks Enterprise Suite.  Here's Glenn McPeak, developer and General Manager of Data Masons at the show.   Glenn McPeak-Vantage Point EDI Software Attending this show was definitely time well spent, and if you are a Microsoft Dynamics user of any kind, I would highly recommend attending this event next year.

I found some interesting statistics that support my earlier post "ISO 9001 - Compliance, or just smart business..?" The main point I made was that although the top reasons for getting certified is typically the "arm-twisting" directly from customers or from corporate mandates responding to industry pressure, the seemingly unexpected result is that increased efficiency and improved financial performance ranked as high as third in the list of benefits cited in surveys from the International Association of Accredited Registrars (The organizations that would come out to audit & certify you) [caption id="attachment_205" align="aligncenter" width="615" caption="First Chart Reflects Top Reasons for Certification"][/caption] This next chart summarizes the top benefits actually cited after getting certified...It's kinda like the doctor making you join a gym for your health, but the unexpected benefit is that you look better, feel better and perform better in other aspects of your life.

Improve Your Cash Flow Why not send out an automatic email message (or fax) to all customers, or just specific customers, regarding their balance due to be paid one week prior to the due date?  Include a request to "Please verify that these invoices are in your system and scheduled to be paid" message requesting that they contact you if there are any discrepancies. Event Manager can automate sending these messages, whether there's only one to send, or several thousands.  This is guaranteed to improve your cash flow. Insure Timely Delivery of Purchase Orders The requested ship dates on your purchase orders support your schedule and your commitments to customers. To help insure that all of your vendors are keeping their commitments, have Event Manager send them a notice a week in advance regarding the expected shipments. Include a request to "Please notify us immediately if you anticipate any problems meeting the ship date".  Also, have Event Manager watch for late shipments, and send an email notification to the vendor (copy to you, in this case) regarding the late shipment, requesting immediate status update.  This should save your Purchasing Manager a lot of phone calls (which might never get done to start with). These tools will send the message to your vendor that on-time delivery is very important to you, and their performance will improve.  Automate Sending Order Acknowledgements Whenever a new customer order is entered, or an order is changed, you should be sending an order acknowledgement to your customer.  This will save time, confusion and a lot of cost over the long haul if your customer has a chance to verify their order and notify you if there are any errors. Have Event Manager send these via email or fax immediately upon entering or changing an order.  Let this be the default, and if you need to, you can use a checkbox on the order to not send one when it is not necessary.  Notify Prospects of Expiring Quotes You spent a lot of time creating the quote for them, but they have not responded yet.  A simple call to action might do the trick to get a response.  "Your quote number 123 for Item xyz is scheduled to expire in 5 days - can we place the order for you?"  That might be a little bold for you, but something to get a response is the key here.  You should find out if they are not going to place the order, and what the reason was for not placing the order with you.  This could be helpful information for future quoting. Let Event Manager do this work for you.  Insure Sales Follow Up There is nothing more detrimental to a sale process than lack of timely follow up.  Use Event Manager to notify you when leads are not being followed up within 24 hours, or quotes have been given without a follow up phone call in 3 days, or (insert your pet peeve here).  Let Event Manager be the watchdog on these activities, and stop letting opportunities slip through the cracks.  Avoid Stockouts If you are a retail outlet, distributor or manufacturer, you probably use many different types of tools and strategies for managing procurement and planning to insure you have the right stuff at the right time.  But supply and demand doesn't always behave the way that you predict.  Event Manager can watch for these conditions, such as an unusually large order for an item.  Ordinarily, this may cause a stock out of the item until the normal procurement cycle replenishes it, causing some lost sales.  This could be caught as soon as the large order was placed, by anticipating normal demand through the replenishment cycle, and suggesting that an incremental order be placed immediately. There's a lot more suggestions where this one came from...  A Very Long List of Possible Uses The possibilities are endless.  We work with a few of these Event Management/Business Activity Management solutions. Check them out here, along with some other suggested uses.  These are extremely affordable applications, with very high return on investment.  They are designed to work with any ODBC compliant database, which includes pretty much every accounting, ERP, and business management system out there today.  Event Management software can do an incredible amount of work, safeguarding assets, improving throughput, lowering costs, and serving the needs of virtually every business objective.  In these times, we all need to be paying close attention to business - so...let's sit down and see how you can benefit ASAP!

Did you, or are you getting ISO 9001 certified because of the proverbial "gun-to-the-head" by your customers..? …Or, did you decide that certification would actually provide benefits in not only the area of quality, but also operational performance and business objectives? There is no question that it costs money for companies to prepare for and maintain ISO 9001 certification. It’s also arguable that many companies would not have opted to do so if they weren't forced to by specific customers or from competitive industry pressures. I’ve worked with a few clients that simply wanted the ISO certificate and the shortest route to obtain it. They would have just bought the certificate if they could have! I have also been fortunate to work with clients that opted to become certified as a way to implement an enterprise-wide, concerted effort to benchmark practices and make improvements where needed as a business improvement objective, where certification was simply icing on the cake. Case in point, my experience with All-New Stamping, Inc. of El Monte, California.  All-New completed the AS 9100 certification to support it's growing aerospace business.  Nick Kopinga, the company President, felt that even with close to forty years in business, the process of becoming certified would force them to properly document the things they were already doing well. Additionally, though, he knew it would also highlight new areas of opportunity to update and improve both their business systems and their management practices. And that’s exactly what they experienced. In particular, the ISO mandate for regular management review of the quality system, and the requirement to achieve continuous measurable improvement was widened in scope to include additional business objectives. Can there ever be any reason to separate quality from any other business objectives anyway? The objectives they monitored only intuitively before, such as on-time delivery, plant efficiencies, supplier quality, product conformance, etc. now have objective trend charts that are used as their dashboard to drive the organization’s priorities for action and improvement. Most importantly, it conveys the metrics in a very visual way to the entire organization, which has given everyone a continuous improvement mindset. What started out to achieve an objective (ISO Certification) has continued to provide true return on investment at All-New Stamping. Check out this case study about All-New Stamping - and call Nick Kopinga if you'd like to hear it straight from the top.