Inaugural ISO 9001 Certification of Elphinstone's QMS

Evahan Assists Elphinstone with its Inaugural ISO 9001 Certification

Evahan assisted the highly successful Tasmanian company, Elphinstone, with the inaugural ISO 9001 Certification of its Quality Management System (QMS) for its two Wynyard based divisions. Elphinstone's Wynyard based business divisions consist of:

1. The assembly of passenger buses for the Tasmanian Government
2. The assembly of wiring harnesses for underground mining equipment OEMs such as Caterpillar,   large agricultural chemical spray equipment OEMs and its own surface and underground OEM division.

Evahan Managing Director and Principal Consultant, Jason Bresnehan, led Elphinstone's senior management team through Evahan's propriety 27 Element QMS Framework to:

1. Design, develop, document, implement and evaluate its QMS
2. Prepare the company for the inaugural ISO 9001 Certification of its QMS
3. Implement of a program of QMS continual improvement

The 27 Element QMS Framework consisting of over 150 analysis and action points checks was applied for:

1. Scoping - assess and investigate the size of the project and provide a fixed price services fee proposal setting out Evahan's approach
2. Gap Analysis - analyze existing working flow, quality systems and quality gates so that they could be leveraged to avoid "reinventing the wheel" and reduce project costs by focusing on closing the gaps and making value-adding improvements
3. DDDECCI -  Design, Development, Documentation, Evaluation, Certification management and Continuous Improvement activities

Challenges Navigated by Evahan
Challenges navigated by Evahan:

• Disparate business divisions with disparate productions systems:
• Passenger bus assembly from a consignment inventory of components utilizing "Build Manuals" as the core workflow document, with a single customer who owned the designs
• Wiring harness assembly division utilizing M1 ERP software as the core workflow document with a combination of global OEM customer's in the underground mining and agriculture sectors, as well as a large internal customer being Elphinstone's surface and underground OEM division
• Customer provided engineering drawing designs, which Elphinstone had no control over, were often nonconforming
• A wide range of legacy software across multiple functional areas of the business in use
• Component input supply often restricted by Caterpillar
• A significant portion of production planning driven by Caterpillar's MRC demand/pull system
• Passenger bus business division phasing out within 18 months' time to be replaced with a defence division, manufacturing hull and turret chassis for armored military fighting vehicles