Puck Partners with CIRAS to meet ISO 9001 standards
In April of 2023, Puck achieved ISO 9001 standards for our quality management system. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is a group of international business experts who establish best practices that all businesses can aspire to meet. The standards set by ISO 9001 ensures that Puck is able to measure ourselves and our processes at every level of our business to ensure that we are performing at our best. “We are always striving to produce a higher quality product, and after being in manufacturing for almost 45 years, we felt it was time to implement ISO 9001 to be able to move up to those standards,” said Laura Pepple, Puck’s Director of Business Development. Puck collaborated with Iowa State University's Center for Industrial Research and Service, or CIRAS, to meet these requirements.
CIRAS helps businesses across Iowa prosper and grow with help in areas such as workforce, leadership, technology, productivity, and growth. “We’ve partnered with CIRAS on a variety of projects with positive outcomes,” said Laura, “so utilizing them as a resource for this project was immediately part of our thought process.” CIRAS project manager Ben Drescher noted that taking on ISO 9001 implementation while actively running a business can be difficult. “Doing this on your own takes a lot of time and people power. We have fully vetted personnel who have a strong track history for being professional and knowledgeable about the standards.”
Meeting the Standards
CIRAS helped ease the paperwork and reviews, relieving Puck employees involved in the process. “When you read the standards, they are written with a very broad brush and sometimes are open to interpretation,” said Laura. “Being able to utilize CIRAS expertise to further break down how a standard applies directly to our processes was extremely beneficial. The number one takeaway from working with CIRAS was their ability to explain ‘the why’ behind the question. They then present multiple avenues of approach to accomplish the task or procedure.”
Puck and CIRAS know just how important a quality management system meeting ISO 9001 standards can be. “An ISO 9001 audit looks at the entire manufacturing system and quality processes, from how products are designed to how employees are trained on quality post checks and how committed management is to a quality system,” said Drescher. “It is a world-recognized standard for how manufacturing is done. Puck is a rapidly expanding company, and obtaining ISO certification will help them attract new business.” The work put into the quality management system was invaluable, and Puck intends to uphold those standards.
In compliance with ISO 9001, Puck conducted an annual internal surveillance audit one year after reaching the standards. “We did our surveillance audit in April 2024 and once again turned to CIRAS,” reported Laura. “They worked well with our team during the entire certification process, and they were intimate with our company and our processes. That’s what we needed—someone familiar with us but who could also bring fresh eyes that would find any gaps.” Meeting ISO 9001:2015 standards will help Puck Enterprises as the company diversifies and enters new markets.
Supply Chain Mapping
In addition to helping Puck achieve the standards set by ISO 9001 for our quality management system, CIRAS helped Puck with supply chain mapping. CIRAS supply chain mapping is designed to provide a company with a comprehensive view of their supply chain. This includes who is providing materials, geographic concentrations, where main suppliers get their supplies, and how shipments are routed. Each supplier is given a risk index score, a picture of the costs, and then interdependencies related to suppliers emerge. “We were seeking to identify high-risk suppliers, as well as high-risk freight gateways. We wanted to understand how to perform a risk assessment on suppliers utilizing this type of analysis for our purchasing program,” said Laura. “Our supplies come from all over the world.”
The ISO 9001 standards achievement features a scorecard of suppliers, which helped the supply chain mapping project. “This is a deep dive into a company’s complex supply chain. It gives clients better visibility of their inbound supply chain. It identifies risks and opportunities to mitigate them,” said Marc Schneider, CIRAS Supply Chain Project Manager. “We help companies know where to focus their efforts and geographically display that with heat maps, taking into account weather risk areas and other factors. Using this information, we can help a company develop risk mitigation plans for top suppliers. All this makes supply chains more resilient and reliable for companies and their customers.”
Partnership Outcomes
The supply chain mapping project helped Puck identify opportunities to build stronger relationships with our suppliers, reduce costs, and improve our efficiency. “One of the key outcomes of the Puck mapping project was being able to assess the risk related to our suppliers across multiple criteria, including reliability, on-time delivery, and critical need of that component,” said Laura. “With this analysis, we are now able to make better strategic decisions to reduce the overall risk exposure to our supply chain, whether that be sourcing alternate suppliers or eliminating hard-to-source components,” she added. “We are also able to approach high-risk suppliers and be very transparent about the outcome of the ISO scorecard and CIRAS risk assessment. With this data, we were able to approach one of our highest-risk suppliers and challenge them to do better. We’ve had great success with them since that conversation. This is ultimately the goal: better service from suppliers and higher quality products for our customers.”
The expertise and dedication to company improvement from CIRAS played a large role in Puck’s achievement establishing ISO 9001 standards. Additionally, Puck saw an improvement in relationships with some of our key suppliers. Puck Enterprises looks forward to a continued partnership with ISU’s Center for Industrial Research and Service in the future.
Read more about Puck collaborating with Ciras in their Ciras News.