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The Gund Company Canada a subsidiary of The Gund Company, is a North American leader in the supply of value-added systems including fabricated non-metallic components, sub-systems, assembly and kitting to the transformer, telecommunication, transportation, electronic and electrical OEM Markets.

Our business model is to be dynamic and flexible with our customers. In addition to design, product knowledge and modern fabrication technology, we use quick turnaround as our competitive advantage. We encourage customers to place frequent orders of just-in-time quantities to reduce their overall costs. We have developed our quality system to support this business model.

In January 1996, The Gund Company Canada obtained initial registration to ISO 9002:1994, which was upgraded to ISO 9001:1994 in December 1998 and to ISO 9001:2000 in December 2001. Over this time our quality system has evolved and actions have been initiated to allow us to meet customers' expectations.

1. We first identified our customers' requirements and concluded that product quality was a given and we needed to continually improve our costs and turnaround time.
2. We developed performance metrics to identify opportunities and to track improvement efforts. We invested in state of the art equipment, upgraded skills and placed emphasis on open communication with our associates.
3. We introduced and reinforced a continual improvement culture to all associates in which everyone is responsible for initiating and participating in changes and improvements.

We began tracking cost of quality in 1997 and through improvements have reduced this cost by 40 per cent over the last five years. We have also achieved business growth in all market segments over this time frame. Our quality system has been a major contributor in achieving our business growth objectives.

We welcome the new ISO 9001:2000 standards and their emphasis on customer focus, performance monitoring, continual improvement, training and communication. During transition to ISO 9001:2000, we benefited greatly from the process mapping exercise. As we mapped our process from receipt of customer request for quotations to shipping of products, we developed a greater appreciation of the relationship of the various functions in the business process. Process mapping allows us to better align quality system with business system, and identify key processes from those that are redundant or require streamlining.

Summing up, our journey of registrations through the various ISO quality standards has been very productive and rewarding. By working with and learning from the evolving standards, we have integrated our quality system with our business model and developed a system that can improve to meet business challenges.

Finally, we would like to express gratitude to our lead QMI auditor, Jeff Witkowski, for his understanding and support in our quality system development. Jeff has made many excellent suggestions which have helped us better focus on our rationales and justifications for process changes and their results. We look forward to his compliance audits as opportunities for continual improvements.