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Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP)

Meeting Cybersecurity and Quality System Customer Requirements

With the help of: Maine Manufacturing Extension Partnership

About

Compotech, Inc. is a seventeen person manufacturing company in Brewer Maine. They are a leader in the composites and defense industries, and specialize in the design, development, manufacturing, and commercialization of blast and ballistic resistant structures and materials. Since 2012, they have been awarded several multi-million dollar projects with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to develop state-of-the-art protection solutions for U.S. soldiers. Their mature and reliable technology is best known for being lightweight, rapidly deployable, and most importantly cost effective. Besides serving the defense industry their services include: commercial fabric kit cutting, engineering consulting, design and manufacturing of composite structures, and commercial finite element modeling.

The Challenge

A key customer required Compotech to be ISO 9001 compliant and their work with the DOD required them to be compliant with cybersecurity standard NIST 800-171.  Lacking the internal systems and expertise to comply with these standards, they reached out to Maine MEP, part of the MEP National Network™, for assessment and implementation guidance.
The Maine MEP and AMC staff have been great to work with.  Their efforts went a long way toward streamlining our production process. We are also grateful for Maine MEP's help getting our ISO 9001 certification. It was critical to landing this government contract. 
— Paul Melrose, President

MEP's Role

Maine MEP worked closely with key employees for ISO 9001 clause interpretation, training, and documentation for compliance with the ISO 9001:2015 version of the standard. Maine MEP brought in third party cybersecurity consultants to assist with assessment and remediation to NIST 800-171. Maine MEP and its partner Maine International Trade Center were able to secure OEA grant funding to partially offset the costs of these projects.

Contingent upon an ISO 9001 compliant quality management system(QMS) and passing a DOD QMS audit, Compotech was awarded a $35,000,0000 contract for ballistic panels. Their cybersecurity assessment and remediation allows them to continue working with the DOD for both R&D and manufacturing projects.

Created August 4, 2022