The Challenge

IATF 16949 certification emphasises the development of a process-oriented quality management system that provides for continual improvement, defect prevention and reduction of variation and waste in the supply chain. The goal is to meet customer requirements efficiently and effectively.

At the start of our journey in gaining IATF16949 certification, we acknowledged that our employees had very little knowledge of the requirements of IATF16949 or ISO9001 and how to create and implement a Quality Management System that would satisfy the requirements of IATF16949.

This acknowledgement was an ideal opportunity to train and empower our staff to be completely engaged on this journey in supporting our objective of accreditation to IATF16949.

Previously we have experienced trainers that struggled to deliver the, (sometimes mundane) nature of the content, into something that engaged our staff and really helped them understand the standard. LMR Global had a reputation for delivering training courses that were well planned out and actively involved all participants attending the training course.

This was a key factor when I was actively looking for a company to deliver our training requirements and LMRG were our choice of partner for this activity.

What did LMRG do?

We started working with LMR Global about 5 years ago, Leigh and Peter came into the business as both trainers and consultants for the IATF accreditation.

They developed a training workshop for 10 of our colleagues, all at different levels of learning and from a mix of departments. The training experience was excellent, they took the mundane and boring content of the accreditation and turned it into light, informative fun. Anyone who can achieve that is extremely good at what they do.

The outcome

We had a cross functional team of engineers and operators who were now trained auditors in the IATF accreditation.

The team were empowered to deliver the audits through their departments, the training had given them the confidence to ask the awkward questions to challenge and deliver continuous improvement to processes.

In our first Certification audit following the training we had 0 major non-conformities and only 19 minor non-conformances which is an exceptional result for the team given where we started from.

With Leigh and Peter on board as consultants this March TGW have successfully maintained certification of IATF16949 with an outstanding result of only 2 minor non-conformities and 0 major non-conformities.

The result clearly demonstrated that the strategies for continual improvement from the team, along with the strong support of Leigh and Peter over the last 5 years has led us to achieve this remarkable result and surpass all our expectations when we set the objective of obtaining certification to IATF16949 in 2016.