Client Comments and Experiences
The following are a few first hand accounts of some of our client's recent experiences in getting to and attaining ISO 9001 certification, along with other process improvement work in larger companies. Also some brief client feedback comments.

ISO 9001 Experiences

The Insolvency Advisory Service
When IAS decided to expand its operations to include franchisees we realised that we would need a best practice manual to enable the roll out to be effective.

This also fitted in with our desire to be recognised as a company that took its excellence model seriously. We decided therefore to apply for ISO 9001 certification as this seemed the most appropriate vehicle to achieve our aims.

Fortunately we enlisted the aid of Brian Mead to steer us through the process. Brian made the process far simpler than it would otherwise have been.

We now use the manual as an integral part of our daily management routine. It has helped us to introduce new complaints procedures, more stringent management controls and appropriate forward planning. It has also helped us improve our customer relations by virtue of the feedback systems.

In all we feel that the experience has been a positive one and one which should be beneficial in taking us through our expansion programme and into the future.

Many thanks Brian for your help and patience with the set up process."

The Digimarc experience....
"When Brian first turned up at our facility I was somewhat wary as it seemed an awful lot of money for getting, well we weren't sure what! However, Brian helped us produce our Business Manual, and we started to work towards it. Even at this point we were not sure if there was going to any benefit. When Brian eventually came to do the pre-assessment audit we were still sceptical even though we had put a fair amount of effort into the ISO 9001 work. We didn't do at all well at this audit, but at the end of it all I began to realise what ISO 9001 was all about; it is simply about running a business to a plan, rather than the haphazard way we had done in the past. Although that had been successful up to a point, it didn't really help us to become more efficient or productive, we were in this kind of 'comfort zone'.

After Brian’s pre-assessment audit we really got down to work, not only dealing with the basic things like good documentation, but finding out from the customer how we could really improve. To help with this we brought in a range of new systems and procedures. Once all the leg work had been done, it was then fairly easy to keep things up to date, and of course we eventually passed the external assessment first time.

Within a fairly short amount of time, the adoption of the ISO 9001 Standard had brought us from being “just successful” to now having the means of becoming much more successful."

Tony Wiltshire
European Service Manager
Digimarc ID Systems
DVLA

The Teamphone Story....
"For many years we viewed ourselves as a “quality outfit” and therefore believed we didn’t need ISO 9001, however we started to revise our opinion when we realized that at least one large business opportunity was going to pass us by simply because of this.

We decided to use Brian Mead, Business Improvement Services to help us with this as he seemed to offer an approach that suited our business. Brian firstly helped us draft our new business manual which gave us the start we needed, although progress thereafter was often slow, partly due to an application of minimum internal effort, and other projects involving revenue being far more important.

However Brian stuck with us and gave us the necessary prods and encouragement, as well as lots of practical advice and help when we needed it, trying all the time to ensure that we ended up with a management system that not only met the requirements of ISO9001/TickIT but also actually helped us improve as a business.

Finally we fixed a date for the assessment and it was then of course that everyone got really interested. We had decided eventually to rewrite our business processes virtually from scratch with Brian’s input wherever necessary, as we felt we needed to do this properly if we were going to do it at all. We also used the opportunity to do lots of other “good things” like spruce up the offices and get rid of a lot of unnecessary clutter, as of course first impressions do count.

The Assessor’s pre-inspection for TickIT was passed with just 2 non-conformities and multiple observations as expected, but this was followed up by a very searching “Dummy Assessment” carried out by Brian which convinced us that we still had a lot to do.

With just two weeks to go we really focused company wide on getting the whole management system running smoothly, and as it turned out the final two day assessment proved to be the easiest part of the whole exercise.

So now when we refer to ourselves as a “quality outfit” we really do have a lot to show for it."

John Lockyer
Systems Support Manager
Teamphone

The Reed Business Story
"Brian helped Reed Business through a particularly critical phase of its global Content Management Project. The project goal was to deploy a new authoring and content management application to around 3000 of Reed’s editorial staff located in the UK, US and the Netherlands. These staff support a wide range of journals including The New Scientist, Flight, Variety and Computer Weekly.

As the project moved from prototype to deployment we recognized the need to significantly upgrade our development and support capabilities for the underlying software applications. We decided to engage Satyam, one of the major offshore IT players, to provide that support. Brian worked with the business analysts from Satyam throughout the due diligence and set-up phases to develop operating procedures for use by the central project team and each of the local country deployment teams. This was important task as Reed had little formal process in place and no prior experience of working with offshore vendors. Satyam are a CMM Level 5 organisation whereas Reed would probably rank at a 2 – Brian helped find the right level for the two organisations to interact at.

As a result of his successful involvement with the CMS project, Brian was subsequently engaged to develop Software Development LifeCycle (SDLC) procedures for use by internal IT departments across Reed Business. The first two components are in the process of being deployed."

Caroline Trewhitt
Director, CMS Centre of Excellence
Reed Business

European Doctors & Nurses Ltd
"Just a quick note to let you know that we had our second ISO 9001 audit yesterday and we passed with no non-conformances. We are sure that it is due to the excellent ground work you did in the beginning. Thank you again!"

Premiere Eurocom Ltd.
"The auditor was impressed by your manual and I wish to thank you for your help in getting us through!"

Dair
"I am delighted to say that we received our certificate for ISO last week. The audit went very well and we only had a couple of minor non-conformities to deal with. Thank you for all of your support in process."

Teamphone
"I just wanted to let you know that we passed our ISO and TickIT audit yesterday. Thank you very much for your assistance. Many of the things we covered over the last couple of weeks did come up during the audit."

Lifting & Marine
"Passed with flying colours"

If you want to just ask a question or two, or wish to discuss further how ISO9000 can help improve your business, then do call or email.

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Brian Mead, Business Improvement Services
14 Priory Avenue, Petts Wood, Kent BR5 1JF
Tel: +44 (0) 1689 601771
Mobile: +44 (0) 7970 064277
Email: bis@brianmead.com

Copyright © Brian Mead 2008. All rights reserved.