FEATURED NEWS

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Doug Glenn (DG):  Welcome to Heat Treat Radio.  I am here today with Justin Rydzewski from Controls Service, and a new guest we’re going to introduce to you in just a moment, Mr. James Hawthorne from Acument Global Technologies.  We are going to be talking about CQI-9.  This is our second in a four podcast series on the new Revision 4 of CQI-9.  We want to welcome our guests today.  As I mentioned, Justin is from Controls Service, in Livonia, where he is the director of sales and marketing.  Justin was actively involved on the committee that wrote Rev 4.

Justin Rydzewski (JR):  That’s correct.  I was an active participant in coauthoring the fourth edition.  My most significant contributions were to the pyrometry section.

DG:  Correct.  And pyrometry was what we talked about last time.  So, welcome back.  We are also welcoming James Hawthorne.    I want you to tell folks about yourself, but as I mentioned, you’re with Acument Global Technologies, a Fontana Groupo company, which I believe is an Italian based company, that is located in Michigan, with its  headquarters located in Sterling Heights.  My understanding is you are the heat treat specialist at that company.  If you don’t mind, please tell us a little bit about  the company and yourself as well as your involvement on the CQI-9 committee.

James Hawthorne (JH):  I work for Acument Global Technologies.  I am the heat treat specialist for our North American facilities.  I handle the heat treat systems, the system’s compliance, and quality assurance for the heat treats within our organization.  Acument has been around many, many years.  We make fasteners – nuts, bolts, rivets, washers – for the auto industry.  We make it for off-highway equipment, things like tractors and bulldozers and whatnot, and we also do building and construction fasteners, as well as things that are holding bridges together, and roller coasters — you name it, we probably have a fastener in it.

[blockquote author=”James Hawthorne, Acument Global Technologies” style=”1″]We’ve been working on this document for quite some time.  Through a lot of expertise and many, many, many work hours, I believe we’ve put together a really good product for the industry.[/blockquote]

DG:  We appreciate that!  We were talking before we hit the record button how the world would be a worse place if fasteners weren’t holding stuff together.  I do want to mention, before you go on, that according to the Acument website, the company is described as the world’s most innovative manufacturer of value-added screws, bolts, nuts and cold formed components.

Please continue.  Tell us about you and your role on CQI-9.

JH:  I’ve been in the heat treating industry for over 25 years.  My formal education includes metallography and statistical process control.  I’ve held positions in heat treat including maintenance, working in the laboratory, working in supervision, and now I work in the corporate capacity, which is what led me into AIAG.  We are a member company, and I was brought in to add as much value and knowledge as I could, based on my experiences.  Currently, I am the chairman of the technical committee.  We’ve been working on this document for quite some time.  Through a lot of expertise and many, many, many work hours, I believe we’ve put together a really good product for the industry.

DG:  Basically, you’re the technical director of the committee?

JH:  The committee chairman.  The important part is to try to keep everybody on task; you’re more of a task manager at that point.  You get a lot of smart people in a room, and trying to corral that intelligence is not difficult; it’s just making sure that we stay in the right lane, get to the bottom of what we’re trying to get to, and complete the specific task in the moment.

DG:  I asked Justin this the last time, and I’d like to ask you, too, just to get your perspective.  How would you explain CQI-9 to someone who has essentially zero understanding of what it is?

JH:  First I’d start with the acronym itself.  CQI-9 is Continuous Quality Improvement.  The purpose behind it is to put together a system that will help you manage and control your process, and at the end of it, the product that you’re delivering to the end user.  The intent is to give you those guidelines to help avoid potential spills or escapes or whatever else may come with that.

DG:  Right, any of the hurdles in the process itself.  It’s mostly heat treat related, yes?  Or is there more than just heat treat there?

JH:  It is the entire system of heat treat.  If you look at the heat treat system assessment, the first portion of it is quality based.  The second portion (section 2) is the floor responsibilities, things that are on task that are being completed.  And third, you get into the maintenance and the pyrometry portion of it, very specific to the pyrometry and very specific to atmosphere control.  At the end of it, there are some very specific induction questions, because when it comes to induction, there is no real furnace at that point, so you want to focus on those key elements of induction.

DG:  Justin, the last time we talked about this, we tried to break this down to keep it simple – the CQI-9 and the four basic sections.  Very briefly, let’s review those and then we’re going to jump into talking about heat treat system assessments and job audits.  Can you give us the four categories?

JR:   CQI-9 is broken down into a few sections and one of the reasons for that, per our conversation last time, it is not exactly like an AMS2750, which is a pyrometry standard.  Instead, this is a system assessment.  It is meant to assess an entire system of heat treat.  It includes a multitude of sections that address the system as a whole.  It starts with your heat treat system assessment, which often utilizes an acronym of HTSA, then you have a pyrometry section, then a job audit, and then your process tables and various different support elements, like a glossary of terms, instructions sheets, and whatnot.  But the four are the HTSA, pyrometry, job audit and process tables.

DG:  As we mentioned last time, Justin, you and I talked down through the pyrometry section which covered things like sensors, thermocouples, calibration, SATs and TUSs.  If you, our audience, are interested in that information, you’d want to go back to the first episode.

James, we’d like to pick your brain a bit on this.  Let’s jump into some questions on the HTSAs, as we’ll refer to them, heat treat system assessments, and job audits.  Let me ask you this to start off.  Let’s go right to the basics: What is an HTSA and what is its purpose?

JH:  HTSA, heat treat system assessment, is a tool that has been developed to help you evaluate how you manage your heat treat system for effectiveness – effectiveness in quality management, effectiveness in the floor responsibilities.  Like I mentioned earlier, understanding that through aspects of training and training effectiveness and into the final section of atmospheric control and atmosphere management and reaction to those.  The purpose here is to have one system, one document that is the rules of engagement for doing heat treat in the automotive world.  What this does is, it allows the automotive industry to give you one spec, one thing to follow.  As opposed to having, say Ford, to give you ten questions where none of them are exactly the same as FCA or nine of them are the same as Ford motor company, where one of them have a specific question.  This encompasses all of those wants and needs from the auto industry to protect themselves, to protect the end user out there in the field that may be using that heat treated component.

DG:  How frequently does a heat treater need to conduct an HTSA?

JH:  The rules of engagement are annually.  On an annual basis you should be evaluating your system for compliance.  The beautiful thing about the HTSA is that it is a living document.  If you find any shortcomings in there, you have the ability to go back and update that and make it match what your reality is after you find the solution to the problem that may have come up while doing your assessment.

DG:  For clarification, these HTSAs, are they conducted by the company, or do they need to have a third party come in and conduct the HTSA annually?

JH:  That’s a great question.  There are no rules to having an independent body come in to do this assessment.  If you have the people that meet the criteria within your organization to do the HTSA, the system assessment along with the process table review and the job audit, you can do it within your own organization.  You just have to meet the criteria that is listed in the book, and these kinds of things are having experience in heat treat, which is the number one thing you must have to be the lead auditor of a heat treat, the understanding of quality core tools and having that audit experience.  Those are the things that you have to do to be able to successfully do an audit and it meet the intent of CQI9.

JR: I believe the intended purpose of the HTSA was initially for it to be supported internally by the organization.  That was the intent of it.  We commonly refer to the HTSA as a self assessment.

DG:  That makes sense.  I assume that when the auditor comes in, he may audit how you did your HTSA, to make sure that it was done well, and all that good stuff.

So the outcome of HTSA is going to be pass, fail, miserably fail; what are the possible outcomes?  I know we’ve talked about “Not Satisfactory” and “Needs Immediate Action.”  I want to deal with those differences, but what are the outcomes?

JH:  “Not Satisfactory” is where you don’t meet the intent of the shall within the related HTSA question.  Now, that could be a simple oversight where it’s very easily correctable- you put the proper things in place and you move on.  If you have something that could jeopardize final product quality, now you’re looking at something that may be a “Needs Immediate Action” and that “Needs Immediate Action” will be evaluated by the assessor and the heat treat organization as to what needs to be done.  CQI-9 does afford the heat treater with 90 days to correct any finding.  If it’s a “Needs Immediate Action,” there should be action to correct that finding immediately up to 90 days.  It’s also important to note that if it’s something that is going to jeopardize product quality, then there is a chance that it “Needs Immediate Action” will be extreme enough to where you have to stop processing – stop processing, fix the problem and then begin processing again.  But that goes to the evaluator.  You have to be able to evaluate that; and that’s one of the many reasons why we look at the assessor, or at least the lead assessor, being a heat treater, because he’s going to understand it, he’s going to know it.  For a commercial house, it’s very easy to have those people available.  In a captive house, maybe not so much, where you’ve got a lot of other things going on plus heat treat.

JR:  I don’t know if you recall or not, James, from the roll-out we had a question that came through, and I don’t know if we were actually able to address it, but they posed a question of why the heat treater was given a greater amount of focus than was in the previous edition.  Somehow, that was an element that required explaining because there was a question of a possibility for there to be issue with doing so.

JH:  If we go back to the conversations that we had about this, I think this was one of the topics we talked at length about, and the rationale behind the lead assessor.  Is it more important for that person to be a good auditor, or is it more important for that person to be a heat treater?  We’re not diminishing the need to have audit experience, at all.  The only difference is that we’re saying that the person that is going to be the lead auditor be a heat treater, because that heat treat experience is going to be much greater than somebody who has audit experience.  Where if an auditor goes out and he looks at every day is cold forming, for example, and how they make the fastener itself, well, when he gets to the heat treat portion of it, is he going to know what atmosphere control is?  Is he going to know what endothermic gas is?  This is the rationale behind this change – that these people are going to understand the language, and that’s the importance.

JR:  The key element is that it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to have the audit experience on that team.  That person is still needed, it’s just the focus shifts a bit.  It doesn’t mean that it is now absent.

DG:  Let’s move on to job audit, James.  It’s different than an HTSA, but what is a job audit and what is the purpose?

JH:  The job audit is the supplemental portion of the assessment process.  The job audit is where you would take apart and walk it through the system and then verify all of the evidence that you’ve put into the HTSA.  You walk the process; you go look at each point specific item based on the job audit flow, and you check: Did the operator check the right amount of pieces?  Does that match what you said in the HTSA?  Did they document their efforts on, let’s say, production report A and process report B, and is that what is represented in the HTSA?

The first part is the “truss,” then you’re verified.  Now, you’re doing some verifying in the HTSA, don’t get me wrong, but this is actually walking that part through the system and ensuring that every box was checked, every “T” crossed and every “I” dotted.

DG:  It sounds like the HTSA is more like the blueprint and the job audit is running a part through and making sure that we match up to the standard, so to speak.

JH:  Yes, sir.  And it’s verification of your reality.

DG:  Is there a requirement as far as frequency of job audits?  How often do you have to do those?

JH:  This is also annual.  You are required to do an automotive part.  I know that some customers might like to see their part in the job audit, but we don’t require it per customer.  If it’s an automotive part, I would say 95 – 99% in the industry, what you’re doing for one customer, you’re doing for every customer, in a 101 kind of standpoint.  There may be some special tests here or there, but overall, your system and your system’s management is going to be the same for one customer that it is for all customers.  If it’s right for one, you’ll do it for all.  And that’s the intent.  Do it with the one automotive customer, and then the next year, do a different part.

DG:  Do you find, in your practical experience, that people are doing more than one job audit a year?  It seems to me, it would make sense to do more than one, but I don’t know.

JH:  I guess it depends on the organization.  I know, for our organization, we do a job audit annually for each process employed.  I’ll give you an example of this.  We have a facility that has belt furnaces and it is neutral hardening.  So, we’ll do a job audit for the neutral hardening.  Then, we have induction in that facility, as well, so we’ll do one for induction.  And then there is stress relief post induction, and we’ll do one for that as well.  For us, in our organization, that’s how we manage it to accommodate the processes employed at our facility.

DG:  Let’s talk about the CQI-9 Rev 4.  What were the major changes to the HTSA requirements?

JH:  Right off the top, the big change was the format.  In the 3^rd edition, you had one question that required one answer.  There were many shall statements inside that one question, so you were trying to answer a multifaceted question in one area.  Now, the HTSA is slightly different where you have one kind of overall question and then each shall statement is individually broken out and now you have to show effective evidence inside each one of those shall statements.  Talking through this, maybe it sounds a little odd, but I will tell you that it has cleaned up this document tremendously, where it makes it so much easier to walk the system and expose either your compliance or noncompliance to a shall statement.

DG:  I do have a question here.  You’ve mentioned it several times, but I just want to make sure our listeners understand this.  I assume you’re saying “shall” statements, as in “thou shalt do this and thou shalt do that,” correct?

JH:  That is absolutely correct.  From an auditor’s standpoint, there is a difference between shall and should.  Should is suggested, shall you will do.

DG:  Right.  Shall is a requirement, should is a strong suggestion, let’s say.

Any other changes in Rev 4 as far as the HTSA?

JH:  I would say that there are subtle changes to all of the HTSA questions.  Some of them are maybe not as significant as others, where it’s cleaning up the language or removing some wording just to make the question read clearer.  That clarity to the end user was one of the high priority items for our group when we were doing the writing of this document.

The big thing I would say for anybody using this document, whether or not they’re a seasoned veteran with 20 years of heat treating experience, anything short of reading this document and you’re not doing yourself any favors.  It’s important to walk the document.  It’s important to traverse the document, whether you do it in phases – grab the HTSA and read through it, and then maybe a week later go through another portion of it, especially if you’re getting to the point where your assessment is coming up to be due.  It provides a lot of information and a lot of guidance, and it will help you avoid any potential pitfalls.

[blocktext align=”right”]”DG:  So does that mean less time, hopefully?”         “JH:  100% yes.”[/blocktext]JR:  I would also agree in terms of the changes.  The most significant one is the formatting, far and away.  I think even in the CQI-9 expert analysis article that we did with you guys, Bob Ferry even noted that as the most notable change in his mind was the improved formatting there and how much easier it is now to capture all of those requirements, whereas before you’d have some long drawn out paragraph.   Before, you used to look at it and say that’s a requirement, but when you’d read it closer, you’d find five or six shall statements and multiple paragraphs and were given one box to provide an answer to.  That makes things complicated.  And there are several new requirements within the HTSA questions, but far and away, the changes are really to make it more clear, provide that additional guidance, and define more explicitly what the expectations are of those individual requirements.  To capture all of those, it’s going to take a read-through.  Some of them are minor, some of them are different, but there are new requirements.  There have been a few questions that were added that weren’t in previous ones; they have been expanded on, I should say.

DG:  It is a significant rewrite.  If you’ve done Rev 3, don’t assume you can fudge it.  Basically, start from scratch and go from there.  I think that’s the point taken.

So we’ve covered some of the major changes in HTSA.  How about in the job audit?  What are the major changes on the job audit side, James?

JH:  I would say that as far as major changes, there are not very significant changes.  I think that there were some subtle changes and some removal of questions that in the 3^rd edition didn’t quite fit the intent of the job audit.  For example, it would ask you to go look at something like APQP process.  What did that look like?  In the HTSA, you’ve already covered that, and APQP information you may not find out on the floor.  You’re going to have bin tickets, bin tags, part travelers, production records and things of that nature, so the APQP process you won’t find out on a floor.  So, some of those things were dialed back to where that information wasn’t required to be looked at a second or third time.

DG:  Is it your estimation that a job audit under the 4^th edition is going to take more time or less time than under the 3^rd?  Does the documentation help us to do it more quickly?

JH:  I think evaluating the system and utilizing the job audit is going to be significantly easier; it’s more streamlined and it’s set up to allow you to traverse the process better than it was before.  In other words, more effectively and more efficiently.

DG:  So does that mean less time, hopefully?

JH:  100% yes.

DG:  I think that’s important.  I think that will help those who maybe have some hesitation about looking at Rev 4 because there is the possibility of saving some time.

JH:  I’ve had the luxury of performing six within our facilities, under Rev 4, and I will tell you that the job audit portion is certainly quicker and more efficient.  The HTSA takes a little bit longer because it’s new and the format is new, so aligning everything with what your reality is takes a little bit of time.  It certainly forces you not to assume, which I found to be a really amazing part of this process.  Our company’s systems are very, very common and all of our heat treat processes have the same work instructions.  That’s part of what my job is, is for that commonality across our plants.

Even though I am very intimate with all of our plants and very intimate with all of our processes, going through this process allowed me the opportunity to do it – and I feel do it very effectively – because at no point did I ever stop and assume that somebody was doing something.  It was like, Alright, I’m going to put in what your reality is, I’m going to write down what we’re doing.  And that was a great part of this process, for me.

DG:  I have a final question for you on this.  You know that you’re going to have some people that are going to be doing Rev 4, they’re going to be starting it and doing their initial assessment, if you will.  James, you’ve already done six at least in your plant.  What kind of guides would you give people to not overlook when they perform that initial assessment?

JH: First and foremost, read the question and make sure that your answer makes sense to you as a heat treater.  I would say, even more importantly, if you come across any word in this document that you’re 70% sure you know the meaning of, go to the glossary and use it.  It is a very intuitive tool in this document and those definitions are written as it pertains to this document.  If you need that guidance, if you need that nudge over a small hurdle that you’re dealing with based on what does this mean or how do I interpret this, go to the glossary first.  It is a GREAT tool.

JR:  I think that due to the fact that the 3^rd edition had such a prolonged life on the street of 9 years, that’s going to allow someone to get rather efficient at doing that process of going through that HTSA.  You have a well-developed and worked-through system at that point, and when something comes along like the rewrite/4^th edition and the HTSA, that is going to be very different; where the first few assessments that you perform to the 3^rd edition may have taken X amount of time, I would compare that more so to how much time it’s going to take you for the 4^th edition.  As heat treaters became efficient doing their HTSAs and that time pared down, all of a sudden now they’re given this 4^th edition, and it could seem like it’s a lot by comparison. But it’s just something new.  You will get through it and you’ll start to gain speed overtime. And I think that the clarity and the ease of capturing these requirements within the 4^th edition are going to outweigh the aspects of other things and it’s going to allow you a real good chance to turn over all those stones that perhaps have been assumptive, of sorts, over time.

DG:  The point being – don’t be discouraged if the first several assessments under Rev 4 take you a good bit of time.  It’s probably the same as when you were doing Rev 3: they took a lot of time but you get better and better and more efficient and ultimately, with the format you guys are providing in this Rev 4, it sounds like it’s going to be a much more beneficial outcome in the end.

JH:  Absolutely.  And to give you a time frame, 2–2 ½ days is what it was taking us to do an assessment at one of our facilities.  Now, it’s about 3 ½ days.  It’s not significantly longer, but to supplement the point that Justin was making, take your time.  Read through it and take your time.  It is important to make sure that we cross T’s and dot I’s, especially in our industry.  It is no place to shortcut.

JR:  It’s an interesting point that you made early on.  As you go through the development process here, you don’t want to forget about trialing what it is you’re suggesting that we do, like to put it through the worst to make sure that it’s doing what we intended it to do.  I thought it was a very interesting point that James had made in conversations with me through the development process about one element of the new formatting.  That from a scoring aspect, your scoring is going to be a little different than it was in the 3^rd where you had one box for an answer to five shall statements, you now have five boxes with five opportunities for scoring that differently.  One question, in the previous edition, had one answer for satisfactory, not satisfactory, yada; in the new revision, you’re going to have five responses that are given.  So, it’s going to change the way you would ‘score’ it.  Is that how you would term it, James?

JH:  Evaluate it, score it, yes.  It’s important to understand that any heat treater doing this assessment for themselves should never get hung up on the number of findings, because the content could be so much worse.  If I have findings at one of our facilities where they have ten findings because they had blank spaces on a log that weren’t accounted for, and I had one plant that had one finding, but they were running 10% extra water in their quench oil, I would say that that’s significantly damaging compared to not putting “not in use” in a box where they didn’t use a piece of equipment.

DG:  One “Needs Immediate Action” is probably more important than a half dozen to dozen “Not Satisfactories,” so to speak.

JR:  It’s a similar mentality that I conveyed to my customers when performing temperature uniformity surveys.  I’m not performing a temperature uniformity survey to find passing results, I’m running the survey to find failing results.  If the data ends up showing that it passes, that’s an easy one to handle; you’re good to go.  But I’m running that so I can capture those things we can work on and fix and correct; that’s the purpose.  To a certain extent, that’s the intent here too.  I’m running this to find shortcomings, to find weaknesses, so that I can improve it, so that I can have a more effective system overall.  If I’m going through this with the intent of just trying to pass everything or have “Satisfactories” for everything, sure that’s an easy thing to have if you find it that way, but I’m trying to find those things that I can improve or areas which need attention.  That’s the intent of this thing.

DG:  Gentlemen, that sounds great.  Today we’ve covered heat treat system assessments and job audits, so that will probably put a wrap on this second one.  Next time (episode #3), we’re going to delve into some process tables, the process tables that are in Rev 4 and some other supplemental support information, if you will, to help with the assessment process.  In our final episode (#4), we’re going to pick the brains of these two guys and ask them about what are the practical helps as we’re moving through this assessment and job audit process.

To find other Heat Treat Radio episodes, go to www.heattreattoday.com/radio and look in the list of Heat Treat Radio episodes listed.