To: CIS

As an owner of a Semiconductor Assembly company, I have dreaded for over 5 years the day I would have to put in place a program for obtaining our ISO certification. Two simple reasons, (1) Cost of manpower to implement a system that by most consultants advice is paperwork heavy and didn’t make sense for a Lean and Fast moving Service Company. After many meetings with customers that implemented an ISO program we opted for achieving what we called ISO compliant, Not Certified. (2) After numerous meetings with many consultants over the last two years we were quoted outrages costs for their services plus the actual Auditors cost, which totaled in excess of $40K and some exceeded $50K. Our unique services allowed our company to do business the past 5 years with Fortune Five Hundred companies both commercial and military applications.  Our General Manager, Keith Dungan would always comment, “For $50K we can purchase production equipment to be more productive, not a paperwork nightmare”. This scenario has been in existence up until our introduction to CIS just 3 months ago.

Advotech was introduced to CIS through a member of a technical group we were affiliated with. Like all business, you sometimes just know when something is right and you say, “Lets go for it”. Our first meeting with Bretta Kelly, President of BMSC, LLC consulting got our attention real quick when she stated, “This is not rocket science and you don’t need to purchase the rocket”. After our first meeting it was clear we were going for it with confidence. Although somewhat reluctant, our General Manager, Keith Dungan decided to give it a go and see if this software could be used as effective as his Lean paperwork system that he was so proud of. From my point of view, it turns out to be one of my better decisions to trust a new system that is truly cost effective in running a manufacturing /service company. Personally, I tell all my business friends what we are doing and how all our employees have grasped the system with enthusiasm. With confidence I know Advotech will be ISO Certified by September of this year at a cost that will still allow us to purchase the equipment Keith still wants and I can get some golfing in my schedule.

George G. Crouch

President

Keith Dungan, General Manager further commented...

One item that George pointed out in his testimonial that stands out to me was that I was reluctant to implement yet another system.  Over the last 8 years I have been employed at Advotech, we had excelled in implementing many successful programs that covered everything from Purchasing, Machine Calibration tracking, Asset Management, Job Tracking and Employee Communication.  All of these systems worked very well individually, however that in itself was a problem.  They were all individual systems and were not interconnected.  The thought of implementing CIS, as an ISO stand-alone system was to be honest, stomach churning.   Our management team, lead by George’s encouragement, made the collective decision to proceed. 

Within the first four hours of exploring CIS, I was hooked.   We were immediately able to implement all our individual programs into CIS and with little to no transition issues.  Purchase Requests, Job Tracking and Asset Management, which were previously coordinated through limited simple databases are now operating flawlessly and we now have added features such as e-mail alerts and inspections panels at our fingertips. Our employee communication program (that was previously all manual) has improved ten fold.   We lacked programs for some ISO tracking requirements such as Customer Feedback and Non-Conformity Reports and with CIS these were implemented almost immediately.  This saved us an incredible amount of time and money.