Company Profile: Mercury Aircraft Inc. was founded in 1920 and since then, has strived to "Be The Best". This pertains to relationships with customer, suppliers, employees, and the community. Mercury Aircraft Inc. has become a leader in the Contract Manufacturing world. Whether it's the fabrication of a simple metal cabinet, or a complex, highly engineered business product requiring assembly of plastic, metal, and electronic components, Mercury does it all. Mercury Aircraft Inc. holds a strong presence around the world with over 1.5 million sq. ft. of manufacturing facilities in New York, subsidiaries in Florida, North Carolina, Minnesota, and Mexico, alliance partnerships in Europe and Asia and a wide range of experience in high value product design and manufacturing. Our focus is to become a global supplier united with a common quality management system using the ISO9000 series as a management standard.

Situation: Mercury Aircraft has had a long tradition of customer satisfaction and loyalty with most of its customers being repeat customers, some with more than 60 years of satisfied working relations. Unfortunately Mercury fell prey to the "China Syndrome" and a good portion of the work went overseas. Mercury was forced to seek new markets and in doing so, discovered yet another disadvantage with not being ISO registered. To complicate matters, Mercury realized that there would be a significant cost in implementing and maintaining ISO registration. Internal audits would have to be performed, which meant that individuals would need to be trained and production hours would be lost.

Solution: Mercury decided to implement a documented system supporting the ISO9001:2000 standard. Rather than utilizing a consulting firm, Mercury decided to pull from resources within the company and assigned a management representative to:

• Identify procedure level, and work instruction level, documentation requirements.

• Identify activity (current conditions) that supported each procedure and work instruction.

• Document, via QMS Manual, Procedures and work instructions all requirements related to the ISO standards.

• Implement the newly defined system.

• Audit the system.

• Seek ISO registration.

The first 4 steps were a time-consuming effort that took close to two years to complete. Once completed the abilities from within the organization were exhausted and it was recognized by top management that an outside source was needed to get to the next level. Mercury needed to train their employees for internal auditing.

Enter AM&T:

AM&T began with an extensive gap analysis of Mercury's system and put together a detailed, aggressive plan to bring the system to complete compliance to the standard. AM&T then identified significant cost savings by providing internal audit services rather than training Mercury employees to do their own audits and began the process of internal audits. AM&T's contracted services began in late November of 2006, and with the continued efforts of AM&T and Mercury's management team, Mercury Aircraft Inc. achieved ISO registration on January 24th, 2007. Over the course of a year, Mercury will recognize cost savings of up to $30K by not having to train their employees as auditors, or loose production hours while employees are conducting audits.

Results: Although difficult to quantify in dollars, it is clear that the efforts AM&T provided in helping to achieve ISO registration and maintaining the registration have led to the increase in Mercury's customer base by 20% within the first five months. Potential sales of over a million dollars a year have been recognized within that same time period. With AM&T performing internal audits, the man-hours required by Mercury for maintaining the system have been reduced significantly, offering a cost savings of more than $30k. Mercury has undergone it's first surveillance audit by it's registrar, and due to the efforts of AM&T conducting internal audits and finding areas to improve prior to the registrar's visit, the registrar found zero majors, zero minors, and zero opportunities for improvement.

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