Breaking Down Silos: How American Woodmark Unified Quality Across 18 Facilities with EASE
Overview
To support a new corporate framework and customer experience strategy, American Woodmark transformed its quality management from a fragmented, reactive, and product-based approach to a unified, process-based model. EASE played a pivotal role in this transformation by standardizing and digitizing audits across its plants, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and executive-level insight.
Background
American Woodmark Corporation is one of the largest cabinet manufacturers in the world, operating 18 manufacturing and distribution facilities across the United States. With a 45-year history in the industry, American Woodmark has built its reputation on quality craftsmanship and customer service excellence.
A New Strategic Imperative With Customer Experience as a Core Pillar
A few years a go, American Woodmark launched a comprehensive corporate strategy centered on growth, digital transformation, and platform optimization. Central to this strategy was the customer experience, which led to the development of a dedicated customer experience (CX) dashboard. Leadership realized that while the company was already monitoring a wide range of performance indicators related to operational efficiency, it lacked the visibility needed to fully understand and influence the entire customer journey, particularly in areas related to quality.
“Growth isn’t possible without quality — it’s the foundation that supports every thing we build. Quality isn’t just a department’s responsibility. It’s a discipline that shapes every customer interaction. Without it, the rest of our strategy simply can’t hold.”
– Anne Trobaugh, Vice President of Quality and Customer Experience
This meant that quality was no longer a matter of making sure the final product looked right and functioned correctly, said Trobaugh. Quality needed to become deeply ingrained in the entire process, not just the end result.
Bhavan Pandya, Director of Quality Systems, categorized customer issues into three main categories: manufacturing-related defects, order fulfillment problems, and damage incurred during shipping/handling. Because these issues were all lagging indicators, American Woodmark needed leading metrics that would surface potential issues and reveal opportunities for proactive improvements across the value chain. Some of these metrics, leadership realized, could only be captured and shared through a more modern, unified audit system.
The Problem: Disconnected Systems, Limited Visibility
Before EASE, American Woodmark’s operations used a mix of homegrown and manual quality tools, many of which were outdated or nearing end-of-life.
Pandya elaborated further, describing the challenges in four areas:
- Auditor Inefficiency: Quality auditors were spending an inordinate amount of time inputting data and “hunting and pecking” for information, creating significant non-value-added work that reduced their effectiveness.
- Inconsistent Content Management: The company lacked a centralized repository for audit content, leading to inconsistent processes across multiple facilities.
- Inadequate Reporting: There was no effective way to quickly provide actionable information to line supervisors and production managers who needed to respond to quality issues.
- No Holistic View: Corporate quality leadership needed better tools to benchmark performance across locations and correlate audit findings with customer experience metrics.
This fragmentation created operational risks and limited visibility into process quality, with little ability to scale or analyze trends. And because MTO (the Made to Order business unit) and MTS (the Made to Stock business unit) operated with their own audit logic, there were inconsistencies in both execution and insights.
The situation was further complicated by an underlying hesitancy within the organization that Daly characterized as, “New is good; change is not.” While some facilities were eager to move from paper to a digital solution, others were hesitant to move away from familiar systems they had used for years.
“We had all this audit data, but we couldn’t do anything about it. We couldn’t prove when we acted on it and whether that action was effective, because our process audit systems didn’t have that capacity.”
– Shawn Daly, Corporate Quality Systems Manager
Transforming Quality Through Process, Content, and Accountability
Daly led the initiative to integrate quality audits into a single, sustainable digital system across all plants. After a comprehensive evaluation of 10 software providers, American Woodmark selected EASE based on both technical capabilities and its long-term partnership mindset. “We don’t look at Ease.io as a vendor,” said Daly. “We look at Ease.io as a partner.”
Strengthening the Audit Process
Using EASE enabled American Woodmark to change its approach from reactive product inspection to proactive process auditing. The shift was fundamental to their quality philosophy.
“Delivering a great customer experience meant shifting from product inspection at the end to focusing on the way we build every step of the process. True quality comes from doing things right the first time, not just catching issues at the finish line. EASE gave us the structure to make that shift possible.”
– Anne Trobaugh, Vice President of Quality and Customer Experience
EASE dramatically streamlined how audits were conducted and scheduled. Designated lead auditors at each plant, called Super Users, now manage audit planning, user permissions, and training. The flexible, mobile-friendly interface also allowed frontline auditors to conduct their work on phones,
tablets, or laptops.
In the first three months of 2025, the company conducted over 184,000 audits, with more than 2 million audit points generated and over 13,000 findings opened.
“Audits that were previously skipped are now getting done.”
– Shawn Daly, Corporate Quality Systems Manager
Strengthening Audit Content
EASE provided the centralized, digital repository for structured audit content that had been missing, helping Daly, Pandya, and team standardize audits across MTO and MTS. It became a crucial enabler for better content governance across American Woodmark’s facilities.
“It gave us the infrastructure to manage content actively.”
– Bhavan Pandya, Director Quality System
American Woodmark’s quality team can now easily iterate on audit questions and checklists across sites, aligning them with key inputs that affect the customer’s experience with the product, like glue bead application or cabinet assembly tolerances.
EASE’s structured approach to audit questions created logical flows that matched production processes, enabling auditors to follow a natural progression through manufacturing steps rather than hunting through unorganized checklists.
Strengthening Accountability and Diligence
Critical to American Woodmark’s mission, EASE enabled a more robust system for findings management that facilitated better accountability throughout the organization.
“EASE makes accountability personal in a way we never had before. When someone owns a finding, they’re responsible for fixing it and seeing it through. That sense of ownership has changed the way our teams think about their role in quality.”
– Anne Trobaugh, Vice President of Quality and Customer Experience
There is now a real-time digital thread connected throughout, from assessment to finding to actions taken, as well as the use of custom metadata to further classify and analyze information.
Additionally, the platform’s integration with Microsoft Power BI was a game-changer, said Pandya. It allowed American Woodmark to connect to EASE’s data warehouse, create custom dashboards focused on business-critical metrics, and present information in a way that drives action.
The platform’s automated alerts and escalation workflows ensure that quality issues receive timely attention. “I get an email once a week on overdue findings,” Trobaugh continued. “That really tells me about the health of the plant in a certain way.” Overdue findings have emerged as a critical leading indicator, enabling American Woodmark to anticipate risks to customer satisfaction and take decisive action to prevent issues before they happen.
Results: Impact Across the Organization
Since the rollout, American Woodmark has seen significant improvements, including
- Improved CX Metrics: With near real-time process data feeding into executive level dashboards, Trobaugh and Pandya report more accurate leading indicators of customer satisfaction. “Our CX dashboard turned all green last year,” said Trobaugh, tying improvements to reduced warranty claims and better preshipment audit scores.
- C-Suite Visibility & Support: Key KPIs, including compliance rates, are tracked at the plant, corporate, and CEO level, creating a tighter feedback system from shop floor to boardroom.
- Cultural Shift in Quality: Using EASE has helped establish quality as a shared responsibility, not just a department. “EASE is now synonymous with quality throughout American Woodmark,” said Trobaugh.
In addition to Process Audits, EASE is now used at certain plants for logistics audits (to address the shipping/handling issues), performance testing, 5S, safety, new construction audits, and product audits. These expanded use cases are being driven organically, by grassroots interest at the plant level, with enablement and support from corporate quality.
Looking ahead, American Woodmark is exploring opportunities to further leverage EASE with enhanced corrective and preventive action (CAPA) support, On-the-Job Training for preventing issues, advanced data connectors, and AI-powered insights.
“We’ve shifted from being product-focused to being process-driven, and EASE has been the catalyst for that change. Quality isn’t something we check at the end anymore — it’s built into every step of manufacturing. That shift has completely changed how we think about excellence.”
– Anne Trobaugh, Vice President of Quality and Customer Experience