All-American Engineering & Manufacturing, Inc. is dedicated to exceeding the demands of many market communities nationwide. In order to make certain that dedication stands strong and provides a lasting and meaningful relationship with all customers they serve.
The experienced workforce at AAEM helps the company deliver fast, reliable and customized products to their broad range of industry buyers. They do contract manufacturing for the Department of Defense and supply parts for electrical switches. Their proprietary line of industrial hinges, Daro Hinge, are used in applications such as prison gates, bank vaults, military applications, industrial OEM equipment, sound attenuation, and radiation shielding.
Because of the type of customers AAEM serves, maintaining their ISO certification is crucial. With an audit fast approaching, owner and president Manny Efiong found his company without a quality manager and a lot on the line. “We had to pivot to something else. We had to look for ways to solve the problem we had in front of us,” he said.
Manny reached out to Enterprise Minnesota to learn more about how we could help them prepare for their upcoming ISO audit.
Enterprise Minnesota’s Keith Gadacz, a business growth consultant, and Bob Arvold, a business development consultant, worked with AAEM’s leadership beginning with that first meeting. “We started with a one-day assessment,” says Gadacz. “Basically, we needed to get a lay of the land and understand gaps.”
Gadacz used the assessment to develop a strategic plan to address the audit. “That was a detailed plan for corrective steps,” he says. “Over the next three weeks, we implemented that plan to fix the immediate non-conformities.”
For the next step, Gadacz took 60 days to help the company develop a long-term plan that would ensure consistent compliance.
Learn more about Enterprise Minnesota ISO certification and audit support services.
What we went through with Enterprise Minnesota taught us a number of things about how the whole ISO process works, and how we should run it. It used to be something that [we] thought we had to push over to the quality manager to run — that we needed to do sales or marketing or strategy and all of that. With Enterprise Minnesota’s help, we realize that this is something that comes from the top. You have to take that ownership and be able to manage it from the top all the way down through the whole organization.