We received the final audit report yesterday. My company received a few findings from the AS9100 audit.  A finding is a lapse in conformance or in other words a situation where we don’t do what we say we do or not doing what we are expected to do.  A finding shows our integrity is not as good as it could be.  Now that we have received feedback on how we are doing, it’s up to us to put it to good use and add value to our organization.  We have a choice to improve or not.  Of course to maintain our certification to the international aerospace standard, we kinda need to improve ourselves.

As I stated last time, findings are opportunities for improvement.  To fully realize and make the improvement effective we have to go through the process of determining the root cause of the findings.  To make a long-lasting change we have to know what to change.  This analysis of root cause can take many forms as more than a few tools may be used to determine  what caused our findings.  No matter what tool we use, we have to go through the same steps of listing out what we know, don’t know, need to know and what’s just opinion.  We have to separate fact from fiction.  We have to understand the facts we have influence over and those we don’t.  Once we lay out all the variables and information, we map out their relations to see if there are a few or just one that has the greatest influence on the finding.  Once we narrow down our information, we choose the information we can act upon and form a plan to fix our finding.  This is called a corrective action plan.  Then we do what we plan and provide objective evidence to the auditors to show we have addressed the finding as appropriate to our business.

So what does this have to do with the business of you?  Simply stated, it’s up to us to understand those things that influence the problems or achievements in our lives and do something to either correct ourselves or bring about more success.  We have to look at the feedback we receive and understand the manageable properties associated with it.  We may have to eliminate causes if we are correcting negative feedback or repeat the causes with positive feedback.

As far as my company, it will be interesting to bring together the owners of the findings to start the process of understanding ourselves with the intent to make things better for everyone involved.  Seeking improvement brings about more quality in our lives, businesses and environment.