OK, so you’ve got your company off the ground, you’ve got a few orders, a few repeat customers, the cash is trickling in, so how do you now scale that business upwards and turn that trickle into the torrent which will support your growth and future income?

Business owners have a huge range of intentions for their businesses, none of which should be criticised – if you are in the senior management of an organisation then it’s your business and it’s up to you what happens to it. I know of business owners who are happy to make one sale a week, then spend the rest of the week sitting on a river bank fishing. I know of others who are fighting tooth and nail for every order they can lay their hands on, and many who fit neatly in between.

So, if you want to make a £200 sale then take six days off to catch fish that’s fine, but you probably won’t be reading this blog, so I’ll leave you to your Carp, Perch or whatever your prey might be.

For the rest of us, getting a business off the ground is difficult, and how you scale it up seems to be a minefield, and in between the mines there are plenty of charlatans, ‘business advisers’* and scammers who assure you they will lead you to a pot of gold….

*I’m not saying all business advisors are up to no good by the way, I’ve met and used some who were excellent, but it is a “buyer beware” scenario.

Scaling Up

So how does your business work, how do you find new opportunities, how do you turn those opportunities into orders, and how do you successfully deliver against those orders and make sure you have happy and satisfied customers who will order again?

A “Management System”?

ISO 9001, is known as a “Quality Management Standard”, this is in reference to it helping form a high-quality business, not JUST the type or condition of the products that business then sells.

Using ISO 9001 correctly will have a knock-on effect, helping give consistency to the product or service you are selling. This standard is applicable to your business whether you are aiming for high-end, prestige products & services with a large margin, or even if you are in a high volume but highly competitive and low margin environment.

ISO 9001 builds on the idea that, in order to be as successful as possible, a business should first look at the market that it wants to operate in, identify and analyse the risks of working in those markets, then ideally find ways to control or mitigate those risks as much as possible.

It then builds on this by encouraging you to define how the business operates; the processes and methods of how your business really works. Then measure how efficient those processes are, with a view to improving them little-by-little, to make the workings of the business as efficient as possible. This should help by taking the process of turning a potential customer into a happy, satisfied one; and then making this process reliable and consistent, which will then enable you to grow as a business and potentially improve your margins by streamlining processes and reducing rework/complaint costs.

Many large procurement organisations insist on their suppliers using ISO 9001, they believe having these systems in place results in a more reliable supplier. In many cases this is then taken further by asking the suppliers to become “certified” to ISO 9001. This involves an independent third-party assessment* of your company’s operating processes, documentation and evidence to show you conform to the standards requirements.

Many businesses find that ISO 9001 opens opportunities with many more customers, it also greatly simplifies the completion of bid and tender documentation: often providing a copy of your ISO 9001 certification will negate the need to answer pages of questions and supply additional evidence to prove your credibility to the prospective customer.

*Within the UK, Europe and many places around the world, third-party assessment is viewed as being critical to proper certification. As such, government-controlled bodies have been developed to ensure that certification companies (the people doing the assessments and issuing certificates) are fair, meet a consistent standard and are suitably independent to minimise conflicts of interest.

For the UK, our body is known as UKAS (United Kingdom Accreditation Service), they make sure the people giving out the certificates are meeting expectations.

It’s easy to check if these companies are approved by UKAS through the online register here.

There’s no doubt about the competitive nature of business, marketing and advertising bombard us constantly, but increasing sales isn’t just about marketing and advertising, it’s not even about having a great product or service. Despite the internet, AI and the increasing role of technology, buying decisions are predominantly made by humans, and to sell to humans (more than once!) you have to gain their trust and show you can consistently meet their requirements.

That’s where ISO 9001 can actually give you and your business some value. It’s not just documents and bureaucracy, its about having a structured way of managing your business, and it can be a powerful tool in helping you gain a competitive edge and close more deals.

Building Trust with Potential Clients

Marketing and Competitive Advantage

ISO 9001 is more than a set of documents, which is why downloaded templates don’t really help; it should be a strategic asset, chosen to help you win customers and grow your business.

Building trust, meeting client expectations, reducing costs, and effectively marketing your certification, can position your company as a top choice in todays very crowded marketplace.

In an era where good and consistent products and services is paramount, ISO 9001 can be the key to additional success in sales, if you need certification why not give us a call, it could improve your bottom line.

Although based on ISO 9001 it has a few specific differences. Making sure that the inspection resources are technically competent, know what they are looking at and what defects could occur is given a very high priority.

How Can we Help?

If you would like assistance in gaining accreditation against ISO 17020, irrespective of your industry, please contact us now by going here.

So, when you are up to your neck in finding new customers, looking after those you already have, making sure your suppliers are delivering what you want, when you want it, keeping your eye on the competition and industry developments, and making sure employees are doing what you employ them to do, how do you also keep track of your responsibilities to the environment, health and safety and keep the business legally compliant?

ISO standards can help manage a business!

Originally quite bureaucratic and very difficult to follow, more recently these standards have been simplified and brought into a standard format. This means that the structure and format of the standards are almost identical, its only how you address the risks relating to the individual subjects (quality, environment, health and safety, information security etc) which change.

This means that in developing a scheme to address one standard, its relatively easy to then add the risks and controls to another subject, even if you don’t go for certification against that standard. Hence, an existing ISO 9001 system can easily be used to manage environmental, health and safety and information security, giving you compliance to ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and ISO 27001 relatively easily. Such systems are known as “Integrated Systems” and are a very cost-effective way for a company to keep aware and up to date with compliance in many different fields.

How Can we Help?

If you are interested in an Integrated System written around your unique business, but compliant with ISO 9001, 14001, 45001, 27001 or any of the growing list of management system standards why not drop us a line and find out how a concise, business focussed system can help your company?

If you need assistance with any element of ISO certification or accreditation, please feel free to contact us by going here.

Typically a small business, say 5 employees, single location, will need to invest about £5k plus some of their own time to gain certification against ISO 9001 – is it worth the investment?

Here’s a few reasons why it may be.

Tendering is a major driver for certification against all the ISO Management System standards. Taking ISO 14001 and environmental management as a typical example, tenders from many purchasing bodies have numerous questions about how a business affects the environment. Finding the information to answer them can take days. In most cases if you have an ISO 14001 certificate you just provide it, skip answering those questions and gain the maximum marks. So, with tendering certification can save hours of senior management time, which after all is expensive, and as tenders have a habit of turning up with short response times an ISO certificate can be the difference between getting the tender in on time or losing the opportunity.

A final point; some companies invest in certification to improve disciplines and help establish consistent approaches to particular tasks or processes. This does work and certification should bring improvements of this type. However, the real solution to getting people to work consistently remains internal discipline – having external auditors visit once a year won’t really make your staff follow the same process all the time. Similarly, if its widely believed that a company’s senior management team don’t really care how a job is done as long as they get paid, then an ISO management system isn’t really going to be much help. An accepted fact is that if any system isn’t supported and followed by those who lead it, then it cannot really succeed.

How Can we Help?

We are an independent consultancy specialising in helping companies gain and maintain certification to ISO standards for the last fifteen years.

If you need assistance with any element of ISO certification or accreditation, please feel free to contact us by going here.

ISO management system standards have been impacting on the UK business community for over 25 years. However, there remains an air of mystery around even the common standards like ISO 9001. Hence the question and the title of this blog. Google tells us that there are many asking basic questions such as  “what is a quality management system?”

Blame The Government

Such procedures were pioneered by Ministry of Defence, to make sure that every shell fired actually went “bang” (but only on the battlefield). Therefore, the original systems were often over-complicated and hard to understand. Hence, complexity and confusion, and the question “What is a Quality Management System?” Consequently, in my drive to make the complex simple, I will describe the “why and “what” of the Quality Management System.

Doing The Same Thing Every Time. You Need To Make It Happen.

Consistency of product or service is a much-neglected issue. Word of mouth tradition may be adequate for a two-man joinery workshop, but not for the manufacture of a medical device or aerospace component. Management may be convinced that all their personnel are “singing from the same hymn sheet” However, some are singing the same song, but in a Country and Western style. Others are Jazz-Scatting and improvising. An effective Quality Management System means an agreed standard, procedure, and outcome. The same song in the same style. Harmony. Good.

What is  a Quality Management System?

Something to Protect You From the Side-Effects of Success

Sadly, many a successful market innovator, encouraged by their initial success, begin to believe their own marketing hype, rather than their quality statistics. They fail to grasp the need for good old down-to-earth consistency. Furthermore, they fail to fulfil their potential due to the inability to do things right every time. Here is a major “why” of a quality management system. No business can survive long term without satisfying customers. This needs to be a managed intention. Success is good. Quality is even better.

Hopefully, we have answered the question “What is a quality management system?” It’s much-simplified, but hopefully not simplistic. There is much more to tell on this topic, specific to your business. Drop us a line.

CE Marking – Does it apply to your product, or not? Even after a quarter of a century in the quality and standards business, I occasionally get caught out.

So Far, So Good.

I wrote a Quality Management System for someone recently against ISO 9001, 2015. The senior management team knew their business, market and customers well, and had that mature, no-fuss demeanour which comes with experience and confidence.

Enter The Auditor

A professional, friendly chap. He did exactly as I would have done, wandering into the assembly area, spying incomplete assemblies, and asking “What legislation apply to these products” “None”, said the customer. (“I’ve been down this road, there are no issues. We’re almost home and dry.” I thought). Now comes the next question…

“What About CE Marking, Then?”

The customer said “I don’t think it applies”, (“Hang on a minute, he gave a definitive “NO” when I asked…!”) The auditor, knowing the product, asks “what about (X)?”

Instantly, I knew I’d messed up – it was obvious that the legislation mentioned would apply, and the goods therefore needed CE marking. In my defence I had asked the question, and he’d said it didn’t apply. (After all, he would know his own business and products, wouldn’t he?)

What I Learnt Today…

So for anyone out there who isn’t sure if CE marking applies to their products here are two hints:-

Help is At Hand On-Line

First of all, try going here. It may be a government web site, but the explanation is pretty good and the English doesn’t seem to have been written by a lawyer previously employed by “Yes Minister”.

You Will Need A Technical File

Start compiling a Technical File for the product.

If you find from this that CE marking DOES apply then a key piece of documentation you will need to create is the Technical File

If you don’t have the required data to create this, you probably shouldn’t be selling into this market !

The content of a technical file is described through UK and European legislation. It should be a document which fully specifies the technical performance of the product and how it complies with the applicable European Directives. As a general guide, it should include:

• An outline description of the product, possibly supported by a photograph or diagram.

• Electrical content – circuit or wiring diagrams etc.

• An outline diagram, often a General Assembly drawing

• A full list of the applicable legislation and standards

• Details of how you have ensured the product meets those standards, such as risk assessment & testing

• Details of any controls or logic which enables the equipment’s functionality

• Technical specifications for any sub-assemblies or bought in components.

• A Bill of Materials or Parts List for the equipment

• Diagrams showing markings and labelling applied to the product

• A set of user instructions and any maintenance needs

• Reports covering the functional testing of the product.

• Commissioning or Quality Control requirements

• And finally, a Declaration of Conformity, stating what directives and standards the product meets and authorised by a senior member of the company management team.

CE Marking is a complex and difficult subject, so this brief post is not intended to be an exhaustive guide to its implementation. However, knowing the applicable legislation for your products, and knowing how its performance has been verified is fairly important, so I hope this helps those with questions.

We’re Not Far Away

Meanwhile, we’re here to help, of course.