Sturdy Corporation Becomes ISO 14001 From QS 9000 Foundation

There is no trophy case in the entrance of Wilmington's Sturdy Corporation, but ask Doug Oerth about his recent ISO 14001 certification and you will see him swell with pride like a coach who has won the conference title. Oerth, director of quality assurance at Sturdy, has every right to be proud.

Oerth and his team accomplished what other companies only dream of doing: they built a quality management system that successfully integrated their QS 9000 with ISO 14001 requirements. Moreover, they did it in record time.

Sturdy employs 150 people to design and manufacture automotive and marine control and display systems. “I wanted an integrated environmental and quality system,” said Oerth, “and knowing our QS 9000 periodic audit was coming up, it gave me target to shoot for.” Another driver was the requirement from the automotive industry to be third-party certified to ISO 14001.

Sturdy proved that implementing an ISO 14001 Environmental Management System (EMS) does not have to be as lengthy a process as many may think. Their QS 9000 laid the foundation. In anticipation of the upcoming QS 9000 surveillance audit in May, Sturdy thought they would combine efforts and tackle ISO 14001 certification at the same time. This novel approach of “auditing both quality and environmental management systems at the same time allows better utilization of resources,” said Sue Belford, quality engineer and led auditor. Some of the same requirements and same methods are used. “We have a mature QS 9000 quality system,” said Oerth, “and we used that foundation to build an integrated environmental and quality system.”

“Certification in zero to 90 days,” Shawn Russell, reliability lab manager and EMS coordinator. Sturdy was ready to make a commitment and ready to, as Oerth said, “give some credibility for [environmental] citizenship in the community.” Oerth called Cape Fear Community College’s Focused Industrial Training coordinator, Isobel Charlton asking for help with EMS training and she referred him to IES. Through this partnership, Study proceeded to implementation.

Oerth gives the credit to his team, led by Russell, Belford, and IES environmental engineer Charlie Parrish, who provided the audit team training and technical advice. “Since we already had the quality system in place and with Charlie’s guidance, we stayed on track,” Belford said. Parrish offered ongoing training and assistance. He also helped determine which federal and state standards are applicable to Sturdy – a big part of ISO 14001.

“When I heard how quickly they wanted to get this done, I started rolling my eyes,” Parrish said. “They expected to incorporate ISO 14001 in three months.” The process generally takes eight months to a year to complete.

Oerth and his implementation team attended an IES ISO 14001 Overview class led by Parrish in January. Following that class, they started identifying environmental aspects, establishing trgets and objectives and working on legal and other requirements. Parrish spent a day and a half at Sturdy ranking significant aspects, defining environmental requirements, developing Level II procedures and conducting an introductory EMS auditing class for the Sturdy auditing team. Parrish returned in April to determine where the Sturdy EMS fell short of the ISO 14001 standard. The EMS, which was started in February, would be audited in May.

An effective environmental management system must be customized to work for the individual company. Sturdy, led by Belford and Oerth, trained five internal auditors in-house. Knowing that one size does not fit all, Sturdy designed their own training. “Instead of sending our staff to a generic class,” Belford said, “we held our own that allowed training to be tailored to fit.” Again, it is that team mentality willing to put lots of work into the implementation. “We kept pounding away at it,” Russell added.

The registration auditor team had to struggle at first with this integrated system. Sturdy added minimal new procedures and used streamlined forms to eliminate quality and environmental document duplication. The end-results were clear and concise. After reviewing the system using Sturdy’s Intranet document control system, the auditors eventually concluded that Sturdy is a benchmarking organization – “noteworthy” of best practices – which is not a term that is thrown around lightly. It is used only when referring to champions.

To learn more about ISO 14001 contact Charlie Parrish at 919.515.4266 or charles_parrish@ncsu.edu.



August 2003