How a quality veteran from The Will-Burt Company replaced multiple quality support systems with Unifize and boosted issue closure time by 75% within the first month

Our customer base is really spread out. We do a lot of commercial construction, military, a lot of aerospace work, and with all these different customers, they all have their own set of requirements and expectations. There's just a lot of diversity and there are a lot of, a lot of mixed requirements. It really makes it challenging from a quality standpoint to try to address all those variables in the quality world.

Yeah, Hello. My name is Ted Carr. I'm director of Quality here at the Will-Burt Company. I've been here for 40 years now. We're a company of about 350 people, and my responsibilities are are for quality in both quality assurance and quality control. And one thing I've learned is the boundaries of quality, they go well beyond the quality department. They involve all the functional groups such as Human Resources, Sales, Engineering, Purchasing, Receiving, Manufacturing, Maintenance, Shipping and Customer Service.

So again, our quality system has been in place since 1994. We haven't really kept pace with the technology offerings that are out there. What that's resulted in is not the most efficient system and certainly not a closed loop system. We became masters at using spreadsheets. Microsoft Access, Visual Basic and different programs to help support our quality activities. So having separate systems like this, it doesn't automatically tie in related issues together in an efficient manner.

You know, an example of getting a customer complaint or a VoC, as we like to call them, only to realize that we had an internal issue that was very similar. And then as you dig deeper, you ultimately find out that you also had supplier issues that contributed to the issue. So when trying to tie in these different systems together, became very time consuming and not the most, not the most efficient.

It was also challenging to see the correlation between these issues as we would prepare for our management reviews, we put the data together and we would start to see trends that were there, but having the different quality systems in place for everything together. So you couldn't see those trends.

Another drawback to these multiple systems is not having a solid way of establishing ownership and accountability. Most of the software I looked at out there, I really felt like it was boilerplate, and aside from maybe moving a few fields around or changing color schemes, you get what you get.

if it's not easy to use, if the implementation takes a long time, it was a tremendous amount of training. If the learning curve is large, the people aren't going to take an interest or they're going to, they're going to turn it off and they're just not going to embrace it.

It just happened to be the very last software that I that I looked at was Unifize. And Ben Merton, he found me on LinkedIn. He sent me an email on it and it piqued my interest. A short conversation later, we set up a WebEx and we explored a little bit deeper into what Unifize could do for us.

And I found it, I just found it very interesting. And on a 180 degree approach to how we could address quality issues. We've now reduced our number of quality support systems from what was five different systems. It's now consolidated into one platform, which is Unifize.

And regardless of that activity or that task, they all have very clear assigned ability and accountability. That's something we were really missing in our, in our old systems. And again, that just drives a really solid behavior on getting, on getting issues closed.

Our tasks that have taken weeks or months are now completed in days. And we just know that as we mature, we'll continue to see improvements in the efficiency of the effectivity of what the software can do for us. We've already had conversations that have launched and then closed all in the same day. And for us that's just unheard of.