oppie wrote:

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in message
...

snip
ISO9001 can be a royal pain in the ass. All it really does is set a
rigid standard for your paperwork. In the US UL does the quarterly
'audits' where someone who has no idea what your job is, or how its
performed tries to trip you up. A lot of implementations are done by
consultants who expect you to make your business conform to their
prepackaged system, rather than examine the current practices and
implement it in ISO9001 format. BTDT for the endless Dilberesque
meetings, then told my boss that if I was one of the victims selected to
be audited, I would hand the test procedure to the auditor and tell them
to show me how to do the job.

I wonder how many workplace shootings are in ISO9000 companies?

I had my fill of milspec and DECAS at Cincinnati Electronics. It
took over six months to update a test procedure for the PRC-77 radios,
since the test equipment was chosen for the PRC-10 design, which was two
generations older, and all tube. The PRC-77 design was done by RCA, and
ended up as a NATO unit. What a stinking nightmare! RCA never got it
into production, and the contract was subbed so many times that some of
the intermediate companies were either out of business, out of the
military contracting business, merged with another company, or simply
changed their name. it was full of Germanium transistors, in the late
'70s. Most were obsolete and had to be custom manufactured. The RF
front end was from Motorola. They said they couldn't run 100% testing,
so they agreed to ship an extra 10%. If the failure rate exceeded that,
they would replace the lot with another untested batch. Two poor SOBs
spent eight hours a day in incoming inspection doing 100% testing on the
obsolete parts.

That is one reason a lot of military electronics is now COTS.



ISO9000 at it's most simple is "say what you do and do what you say" but of
course we all know that the devil is in the details.

I work for a rather small privately held company and going ISO9001 although
a royal pain was a good thing as it did force implementation of good
engineering and documentation practices (especially since I got to write the
engineering governance sections... buahh-ha-ha as jt would say).

Back to the original thread - we're so small that mostly we only get
catalogs when the reps get new ones and decide to purge the old stock :-(


After everything it it is obsolete?



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