Latest news on our ISO 9001 accreditation
Over the last year, we’ve all been working hard to implement ISO 9001 into the business. I can’t say it’s been easy! It was a daunting task at the beginning, but it’s been a real experience, and it’s helped us and our business in so many ways. The great thing is that ISO 9001 is a framework of best business practice principles that you adapt to your own business and your way of working, making the quality management system your own. You can buy off the shelf systems, but they’re an attempt to make something generic out of something that should be very specific, and closely linked into your business, so we didn’t go down that route. I’m glad we made that decision because it really feels as though we’ve invested our time and money well, and now we have something that we can really use and truly belongs to us all.
I must say that BSI have been fantastic. I attended their 2-day ‘Implementing ISO 9001′ training course last year, and it really explained what to do, the problems to watch out for, and answered most of my questions about how the approach applied to our business. I don’t think we would have created such a personalised and useful quality management system, as well as we have, if I hadn’t been on the course. Equally, Steve Mason, our BSI Client Manager, has been instrumental in guiding me down a path to create a robust system without over complicating anything.
Quality is such an important part of what we do that we aren’t treating our quality management system as a separate entity at all, it’s just our business management approach; a completely integral part of how we run our business. Fortunately for us, our business principles were a close fit with ISO 9001 already, so the idea of things like monitoring and measuring quality, having a customer focused approach, and taking corrective actions when things go wrong, weren’t new to us. For the most part, we just needed to adapt our procedures and formalise our approach in certain areas, to fit with the standards. There’s no question in our minds now though - we are a better business as a result.
We’ve implemented our quality management system into our procedures now and I’m delighted to say it’s working well. It isn’t perfect yet, but a key lesson ISO 9001 teaches you is that it’s okay to make mistakes, as that’s all part of the process of continual improvement. What’s important is showing that you have a mechanism to help you learn from those mistakes, and putting a process in place to stop the same mistake from happening again.
Our initial assessments with BSI have gone well - we’re now waiting for the final assessment at the beginning of July. At the moment though, it’s looking good for us to get that coveted kitemark!
This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 11:36 am and is filed under Business Advice, Eximium News, News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
