MARINE CORPS LOGISTICS BASE BARSTOW, Calif. -- For years, Maintenance Center Barstow has consistently delivered quality products. Much credit is placed upon the mechanics and supervisors who work on the vehicles, but another, lesser-known department is also a vital cog in the maintenance machine.
The quality assurance department, as small as it is, is largely responsible for every piece of equipment that comes out of the Maintenance Center.
"We have about 26 quality assurance inspectors," said Kenny Phillips, quality assurance inspector supervisor. "Those inspectors are responsible for ensuring the customer's requirements are met. They make sure all the required testing and documentation is completed. That includes research, modifications, road tests, float test and many more."
With 26 inspectors working on all these different tasks, Phillips said, many of them have to work with numerous departments at one time.
"Everything from optics to rolling stock and electronics," said Phillips. "They're stretched pretty thin sometimes."
Though a major portion, inspections are not all of the department's responsibilities. The technical library is also a crucial piece of the quality puzzle.
"The technical library is where we keep all the documents for repairing the vehicles or any of the commodities that we have," said Joann Troup, technical library branch head. "We also have a lot of different ways, by Web sites mostly, to get information. If a manual needs to be updated, we're the people who do it."
With only six employees in the library, this section also has workers stretched between many tasks.
"We have around 18,000 documents in our library," said Troup. "We also have an archive and when these documents change, we have to send notices to supervisors informing them that their manual needs to be changed or that it is obsolete."
Even with the increased workload of new modifications due to actions abroad, Troup and her section at the library still find time to improve.
"My next goal is to start bar coding," said Troup. "It will make everything we do faster. We'll have a better method of checking material in and out. It will be a massive undertaking."
With so much slowing down the progress, Troup still keeps a positive outlook for the section.
"It's ongoing and sometimes hard to stay caught up," said Troup. "I'm hoping that bar coding will help with a lot of the busy work we do."
Inspections and constant documentation are two very important aspects of the quality assurance department. However, there is no more important aspect of the quality assurance department than the effect the department has as a whole.
The Maintenance Center is registered with the International Organization for Standardization, said Fred Alley, quality assurance branch head. The ISO is a third party organization that inspects the quality system in place at the Maintenance Center.
"There are certain standards we have to meet," said Alley. "If they find something wrong with our quality system, they give us an opportunity to correct it. If the discrepancy is bad enough, they can pull the registration."
Being ISO registered is very important to the Maintenance Center, said Alley. Without the registration, it could lose most of the work being done there.
"It says on a lot of the statements of work that we get from our customers that the Maintenance Center, or whoever is performing that particular job, must be ISO registered," said Alley. "There are certain jobs that we couldn't even bid on if we didn't have a quality certification. So if we lost it, it could cost us a lot of jobs. Most of the work we do here for the Marines requires us to have an ISO quality measuring system."
Even with current manpower shortages, and stringent requirements, the quality assurance department continues to supply quality products with little complaint.
"So far this calendar year we've had two product quality deficiency reports," said Glenn Tibbitt, quality assurance supervisor. "The two that we have had were very minor deficiencies."