Worldwide leader Covercraft gains certifications by automating quality management with SoftExpert Solutions

Since 1965, Covercraft Industries, LLC has had the vision to be the most sought-after source for customers looking to protect their investments, hobbies, adventures, and memories. The company designs and manufactures quality products such as protective covers for automotive, marine, recreational vehicles, aircraft, and many others. The innovation, expertise, and quality processes the company has delivered for over 55 years have made it a world leader in this segment.

Covercraft has global headquarters in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, and has over 500 employees in its manufacturing facilities in Oklahoma, California, South Carolina, Texas, and Mexico. Its portfolio includes more than 65,000 products and the Company is ISO14001:2015 and now IATF 16949:2016 certified.

Over the last five years, the company has seen substantial growth due to business unit acquisitions as well as organic growth in demand for its products, including ADCO, Carver Industries, GT Covers, and Marathon Seat Covers. According to Covercraft’s Quality Director, Roby Potts, the company began to experience some post-expansion hardships in managing quality processes in an organized fashion and it turned to the global software market for help. “We were looking for a solution that could be implemented across all of our facilities, with central administration.”

Covercraft received certification of its Quality Management System at three Group units, in less than 12 months of the project, with the support of the SoftExpert EQM solution for enterprise quality management. But how was this result achieved?

Covercraft's Biggest Challenge

The company was making acquisitions and evolving more, day by day. All this without having control of project documentation and quality. Then, the big challenge for Covercraft was to think about how they could overcome this problem once and for all because, in the future, it would be problems when it came to passing audits or quality assessments.

It is worth remembering that the manufacturing sector of the automotive industry is increasingly competitive and standardized, thus further increasing the need for the company to be fully aligned with market expectations.

According to Roby Potts, “Covercraft has evolved from a collection of acquisitions that operated independently to a truly consolidated manufacturing and sales company. At launch, we had zero documentation and control in five of our seven locations. After reviewing multiple products/services over three months, we chose SoftExpert's Excellence Suite because it addressed our immediate needs/risks, and was easily scaleable (we could add additional plants as needed).”

Thus, the company saw the need to standardize and integrate document control in all its units. It then spent more than three months searching the market for quality and document management software. From the various technology solutions found and evaluated, SoftExpert solutions were the ones that best met the business needs.

The solution found to solve the problem

They chose the SoftExpert Suite to use in the company to help with document control and process. They currently have ~40 users with edit/revision access, and another ~350 users with Read-Only access. To ensure operational security, we use Amazon CloudWatch for server and performance monitoring, Datadog for application performance management, and Amazon GuardDuty for intelligent threat detection. The system is used in all manufacturing and support areas. Manufacturing (operations) use the system regularly (daily).

Primarily, the system is used as their Document Control system, which uses AWS S3 for storage, although they have developed and are using the Workflow and Process modules to establish many of their paperless corporate workflows.

About the Document Control topic, they use the system to develop, release, view, and edit controlled documents. They also administer their Corrective Action system in SoftExpert as well as their Engineering Change process.

Encryption and key management were supported through AWS Key Management Service (KMS), which ensured secure data handling both at rest and in transit. This is why adopting an integrated quality control and management system is essential.

Results observed by Covercraft

Overall, the SoftExpert Excellence Suite has brought significant gains to Covercraft in document control, quality management, audits, inspections, and process efficiency, positioning the company for continued growth and success.

Document Control
When we asked Mr. Potts how SoftExpert Excellence Suit helped achieve Covercraft’s goals, he said: “It helps us by leveraging the documentation system, we have been able to flow multiple products for new manufacturing in sister locations without having to develop local site work instructions. Through the use of tablets on the shopfloor and in the warehouse in our manufacturing plants our operators have instant access to the latest, updated information important to their daily work such as company policies, quality procedures, work instructions, and training documents."

QMS Certification
Regarding the impact of the system on the company’s key metrics, was difficult to tie SE directly to metrics, but by bringing new plants online with existing products, their capacity and flexibility have been significantly enhanced. The company has also achieved external QMS IATF 16949 / ISO 9001 certification of three of their locations and this was accomplished in less than 12 months.

Audits
The biggest direct accomplishment attributable to the SoftExpert Suite launch was achieving IATF 16949 certification in two locations and ISO 9001 certification in a third location. These certifications can be challenging to obtain and certainly having a modern, integrated system helped significantly.

According to Roby in regards to the benefits, SoftExpert’s products enable standardization and efficiency for Covercraft’s daily activities.

"The product allows us to exert a level of control on the organization which drives standardization. The product lent itself to moving quickly. The solution is highly configurable which allowed Covercraft to ramp up quickly and then lock in the controls when ready to release," said Mr. Potts.

The future isn't longer a mystery

For the coming years, the company's expansion is not ruled out, and SoftExpert solutions can certainly help to streamline this growth.

For now, one of the next steps for Covercraft to gain more benefit from using the SoftExpert Excellence Suite will be to fully deploy their recently developed Defective Material Report workflow to keep all stakeholders informed regarding the status of potentially non-conformng raw materials. As always, the Covercraft team members have learned how to build and maintain the business process flowchart and data capture form for this new workflow.

A second SoftExpert Suite initiative is to move their new program development and launch for OEMs and internal aftermarket plans to the SoftExpert APQP module with its full range of native AIAG and VDA compliant forms. The authoring of product data managment, production process flows, FMEAs, control plans, capability studies, MSA studies, and more will support their PPAP submissions to their automotive OEM customers.

Covercraft quality and engineering teams are excited to be able to have these important forms and data synchronized across the entire APQP database to help ensure the accuracy of advanced product quality plans (APQP) and PPAP submissions. This well-coordinated automated logic will mitigate the natural risk from using separate spreadsheets to capture critical quality planning data.

When we asked if the company thought about using our product elsewhere, Roby said “Yes. We recently launched a project to move our marketing documentation to the SoftExpert system”.

It seems that Covercraft's future will be bright and full of achievements and growth. No doubt soon, the company will have even more gains, agility, productivity, and speed in its processes, more standardization, and control over its documents and quality.