Carmeco Goes IATF 16949 Certified in Relentless Pursuit of Excellence

From its humble beginnings in 1970 Carmeco of Lebanon, Missouri, has grown to become an industry leading supplier of parts and components for some of the biggest names in the automotive industry. They also serve a variety of OEM niches that require extremely high quality and precision from their suppliers. Focused relentlessly on service and manufacturing excellence, Carmeco has grown into a 98,000-square-foot facility producing millions of products every month. The company's tenacious attitude toward continuous improvement and growth has made them a recognized player in the domestic metal fabrication industry.

As a leading supplier to the automotive industry, Carmeco has operated under the ISO 9001:2015 standard for years. Demands for even greater excellence from OEMs, combined with Carmeco’s dedication to profitable growth, meant they needed to adopt the IATF 16949 international standard for quality management. “Our biggest customer wanted to step up their game so we needed to do the same by adding IATF 16949 to our quality management system,” says Donti Hawkins, vice president of operations. “We didn’t have the expertise we needed on staff, and we didn’t have a clue on specific areas we needed to improve to meet this very challenging standard, so we turned to our go-to resource for such challenges – Missouri Enterprise.”

Missouri Enterprise, part of the MEP National Network™, had worked with Carmeco on continuous improvement projects many times over the years, so they were well prepared to step in and conduct an IATF 16949:2016 gap analysis to help them identify areas for improvement to meet the stringent guidelines of the standard. Missouri Enterprise’s project manager came on site and interviewed key personnel, reviewed existing quality management practices and went through a checklist of items that differentiated the IATF standard from ISO 9001.

The review focused on many areas of Carmeco’s operation, including defect prevention, product variation and waste reduction, equipment calibration processes and more. He also reviewed the company’s statistical process control (SPC) methods, which are integral to the quality management system. The result was a detailed directional report and consultations that illustrated what the project manager referred to as “the dreaded shalls”, those things which must be done to succeed in their IATF certification journey.