The new International Rail Industry Standard (IRIS)aims to be the globally recognized standard for management systems in the railway industries. The authors of Hepworth Rail International describe their company's journey to gain IRIS certification. IRIS was developed to complement ISO 9001 and is designed to model similar quality standards already in place in the aerospace, automotive and food industries. Its aims are to increase quality across the entire railway supply chain, make the evaluation and approval of equipment manufacturers more efficient, decrease costs for manufacturers and suppliers, and improve the amount and accessibility of associated data. IRIS adds 28 pages of stringent, rail-specific requirements to ISO 9001 and provides a common basis for benchmarking suppliers and assessing their quality capability. Hepworth Rail decided to start on certification in January 2007 with the plan to be completed by December 2007. IRIS requirements touch all aspects of a business: commercial, project management, design, development, manufacturing, commissioning and maintenance. Extensive use was made of visual aids such as suppliers-inputs-process-outputs-customers (SIPOCS) diagrams from six sigma and turtle diagrams. All the tools and techniques undertaken by the company were required not only for the IRIS standard but to meet the demands of the rail industry. The project programme for implementation was over 6 months. The first area Hepworth looked at was the actual staffing structure in terms of management and supervision. The biggest improvement in the manufacturing and quality of outputs came from the reorganization of the shop floor supervision and the involvement of everyone within the company in the IRIS implementation. IRIS has made Hepworth Rail look in detail at every element of the business. The company has seen a huge list of benefits including increased output, reduction in scrap and rework costs as well as improved customer satisfaction.
Eyeing up IRIS accreditation?
Quality World ; 34 , 2 ; 26-31
2008
6 Seiten, 4 Bilder, 1 Tabelle
Article (Journal)
English
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