NES April Employee Spotlight
Employee Spotlight
Chad Tronetti
As an established painter, Chad Tronetti uses detailed and deliberate brush strokes.
It’s this level of precision that allows his oil on canvas paintings, the ones that he creates for family and friends in his home studio, to come to life.
When describing his job responsibilities as Napoleon Engineering Services’ quality assurance manager, however, it’s impossible for Tronetti not to paint with a broad brush.
Given that product quality is at the root of everything we do, and part of the process from start to finish, Tronetti spends much of his time simply responding to others, from customers and suppliers to several of our co-workers here at NES. And those replies are related to anything from contract review and technical queries to inspection and controlled non-conforming materials (NCMRs).
“I’m fielding a lot of questions and trying to keep everybody on track so that whatever decisions we make internally and externally fall within the guidelines of our QMS (quality management system),” Tronetti said. “A lot of that springs from our contract review when it comes to CBM and then our internal standards (regarding) manufacturing or inspection.”
The tasks within the department are much like the questions that Tronetti often must answer – plentiful. Aside from contract review, it conducts first article inspections (FAIRs), coordinates quality control, produces doc packages and oversees inspection requirements, from supplier approval and evaluation to document control and trainings. As such, Tronetti is quick to credit his team for all that it does to help keep quality moving, a group that includes Ray O’Brian, Ashley Brown, Michael Anderson and Joe Frederick.
As department manager, however – the one with final authorization before a CBM job is shipped – he knows that much of that burden falls on him. It’s on Tronetti to manage those several moving parts and create solutions for the snags we inevitably hit.
“I’m reviewing doc packages and assembly routers, trying to maintain the QMS and keep it compliant,” he noted. “Our internal audit program itself, I have to maintain and make sure that we’re periodically doing audits of all the major processes and recording the root causes and coming up with corrective actions (for any problems).”
Within the last year, Tronetti has put more focus into positioning us for AS13100 approval, a crucial requirement for Honeywell and Rolls Royce, which have become even bigger NES customers of late.
Rolls, he noted, has APQP requirements, which include plenty of documentation for each of its part numbers. So, Tronetti has been working with Rolls to provide everything it needs for parts approval.
But these and other painstaking duties come with a clear goal in mind: To ensure that we’re adhering to the highest safety and quality standards, meeting all customer requirements and delivering the best possible product.
And that’s no easy task in a high-stakes, deadline-driven business.
“Chad is invaluable,” NES president Chris Napoleon said. “Quality always takes it on the chin because they raise the red flag when we or our suppliers haven’t done what we’re supposed to do somewhere along the line. When we make mistakes that need to be discussed with the customer, quality needs to be the one interfacing to inform and submit a corrective action. It takes a special person to do this work and stick to your guns to make things right.
“And Chad has been that person for us.”
Tronetti, who’s worked primarily as a quality engineer professionally, but holds a BA degree in visual arts from St. Bonaventure, doesn’t have as much time to paint these days, though he does take oil painting requests from friends and family members. But he still likes to close the door to his studio and “sniff those fumes of linseed oil from time to time.”
For him, there’s no direct line between quality and art that would have led him into this field. “Art’s just life to me,” he said. But art can involve much nuance and detail. And it’s the myriad details of his job that make it so rewarding.
“It’s the constellation (of those things),” he said. “It’s how difficult it is – the difficulty is what I find rewarding. We juggle with knives and people are constantly throwing new knives into the rotation. That’s what I like about it; it’s exciting. And you’re gonna get stabbed sometimes. It happens …
“Customers, when you have a good relationship with them, they’ll understand when you make the occasional mistake. We don’t make a lot of huge mistakes, fortunately. But when we do make mistakes, we’ll make sure that the customer understands that we take it seriously, we know what problem is and we’ll correct it.”