Sulzer Metco’s Stalybridge operation deals in the coating and enhancing of surfaces. It produces materials and equipment for these purposes and develops machining processes for special components. The company’s state of the art products, solutions and services are delivered through a global sales, customer support and manufacturing network.

The company commissioned Equas in May 2010 to create a Quality, Environmental and Health & Safety Management in order to achieve UKAS-accredited certification to ISO9001:2008, ISO14001:2004 and OHSAS18001:2007. Work on the project began in July 2010 and full certification was achieved in January 2011.

Sulzer Metco chose to have their Management System built using the Activ Online Management System and the work was carried out by Julian Russell, a Director of Equas and a Lead Auditor for all three Standards.

Warren Selby, the company’s Health and Safety Officer who was responsible for the project, gave the following feedback:

“I would like to thank you for your support and excellent service over the past 6 – 7 months in helping our site achieve certification to ISO9001:2008, ISO 14001:2004 and OHSAS 18001:2007 Your consultant acted with professionalism and patience and he was prompt, polite and most helpful at all times.

The service proved invaluable to our company, helping us set up and maintain the Quality, Environmental and Health & Safety Management systems using your internet based Activ System. This has already proved to be an extremely important tool and was highlighted by our Certification Auditor in his final audit report as being “a very robust and excellently documented, easy to follow management system”.

“We have received, and are continuing to receive, excellent added value from our relationship with Equas and I will definitely recommend them to other organizations” said Warren.

The company’s link to the University of Sheffield provides it with a number of unique capabilities:

• specialist technical expertise
• state of the art research and support facilities
• highly valued independence and impartiality

As a multi-disciplinary consultancy, ECUS offer its clients a unique, integrated, team approach to project management with in-house expertise in a wide range of technical areas. Their approach has benefited clients through cost and time savings and the provision of added value to environmental projects.

Equas was commissioned in February 2008 to build an ISO compliant Quality Management System for certification to ISO9001:2008. During the creation of this system the client added a requirement for ISO14001:2004 to the project. The combined Quality and Environmental Management System was completed by David Morgan, a Director of Equas and certified Lead Auditor, in September 2009 and certified to ISO9001:2008 by a UKAS-accredited Certification Body in the same month. Certification to ISO14001:2004 was delayed, at the client’s request, until November 2010.

Chris Routh, ECUS’s Managing Director, gave the following feedback:

“In November 2010, ECUS Ltd was successfully certified against ISO 14001:2004, adding this qualification to our existing ISO9001:2008 certification. This is a major step forward for us and I can honestly say that I cannot imagine completing the process without the Activ software and system. The thought of having to develop and run both a quality and environmental management system without web-based software is unimaginable now! We are making improvements to the way we do things all the time and with Activ we can make the changes and disseminate information to all our staff instantaneously, and all the amendments are tracked and logged. It would be a nightmare with a paper-based system.”

Thought to be one of the oldest printing companies in theUKand still owned by direct descendants of William Pollard, it is now a highly sophisticated operation using the latest technology and employing around 75 staff.

The company achieved the ISO9001 and 14001 ‘double’ using the ‘ISO in a Box’ system. Allan Moxey is Pollard’s Works Director, responsible for quality, the environment, health and safety and facilities management of its campus, part of which is rented out to other organisations.

“We’d been thinking about ISO14001 for some time,” said Allan. “When filling in tender documents, there was always the questions ‘do you have ISO14001?’ or ‘do you intend to get ISO14001?’Readingbetween the lines, intending to get it wasn’t good enough. So although we were kind of forced into doing it, we knew we had a duty to raise our environmental standards.”

After speaking with the Equas  consultant, Pollards elected to do both Standards together. “ISO in a Box is tailored to deliver exactly what we need as a business,” said Allan. “We didn’t need to change any of our existing systems – it all slotted together but did make us more efficient. It’s really lived up to expectations and the consultant was an incredible help in keeping me on track. I’d definitely recommend it to any other business.”

Although the printing industry is making real progress in new technologies such as environmentally friendly chemistry, including vegetable-based inks and high spec recycled papers, they’ve not yet been perfected for general use.” There are still some quality issues to be overcome,” explained Allan. “What we are doing now is to ensure we recycle and recover as many of the elements used in the print process as possible such as ink, chemicals, aluminium plates, paper, card, wood and all plastics.”

The new environmental focus has encouraged everyone in the organisation to play their part and the volume of waste has been greatly reduced. “We still have a waste skip on site that is shared by our tenants. Over the last couple of months, we’ve halved the size of the skip and instead of being emptied every week, it’s now every three weeks. The volume going to landfill has been reduced by 80% which saves £400 a month,” said Allan.

“We’re lucky that our tenants share Pollard’s philosophy and have their own recognised Quality and Environmental Standards. In theory, we should be able to dispense with anything going to landfill and that’s our target.”

Joanna Chambers, Meteorological Observer

Is it true that we’re set for wet weather if cows lie down? “No, cows are unreliable – seaweed is much better,” said Tony Pallot and as Principal Meteorological Officer at the Jersey Meteorological Department, he knows what he’s talking about. He’s joking of course. Forecasting the weather is a highly technical and sophisticated science and Tony and his colleagues get it right the vast majority of the time.

They are based at Jersey Airport and provide 24/7 Met services for the Channel Islands Control Zone – Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney – plus any aircraft flying through the zone below 18,000 feet.

Part of the requirement of the International Civil Aviation Organisation is that any supplier of services for aviation needed to have a recognised Quality Management System in place by the end of 2010. The ‘Single European Sky’ initiative, which aims to harmonise the regulation of airspace, quickly followed suit. But it wasJerseyAirport, the Met department’s main client that was the motivating factor.

Tony explained: “JerseyAirportgave us a deadline to have a system in place by July 2010, which gave us just eight weeks. The system that was going to tick all their boxes was ISO9001. All I had to do was find someone to help us – quickly.”

An internet search brought up ISO in a Box along with other Quality Management consultants. “I fired emails off to a few of them and Equas phoned back very quickly, which told me they were very customer focused,” said Tony. “I liked what they told me about ISO in a Box, especially the fact that they could work to our tight deadline.”

Just seven weeks after the initial meeting with the Equas consultant, Jonathan Lea, Jersey Met department had its ISO9001 certification.

“Jonathan was really positive but he did warn me that neither of us would be getting many weekends off. I even ended up taking my laptop on holiday, which didn’t impress my wife too much. The whole process was very straightforward and Equas continued with excellent customer service all the way through.”

The day after the successful external audit, Jonathan was at the airport ready to leave the island but all planes were grounded because of fog – which had, of course, been accurately forecasted!

The Barnsley Alcohol & Drugs Advisory Service (BADAS) is a registered charity providing advice and support to adults and young people. It receives the majority of its funding through Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council.

The drug and alcohol treatment services inBarnsleyare undergoing a significant reconfiguration and BADAS is in the process of tendering for the contract to continue to offer those services.

ISO9001 is now the accepted Quality Management Standard for local authorities and it’s a distinct advantage for suppliers to have that tick in the box. Although BADAS had its own system in place, the pieces of the jigsaw weren’t necessarily in the right places.

Olywn Vance, Organisational Development Manager at BADAS explained: “We came across ISO in a Box and liked what we saw. I think that ISO was initially created for manufacturing companies but when I met with Mike Dowd from Equas , he clearly explained how it could be applied in a service organisation. But the huge benefit was that the system would be built to fit us, rather than us having to adapt to fit the system.”

It turned out to be a speedy and straight­ forward process: “Our Equas consultant, Mark Pendleton, first got to know us as a business to understand how we wanted to use it. He kept us informed at every step and when he came back within two weeks with the system built, it was almost perfect and ready for us to populate. The thing that was really useful was that he put us through a dummy run for the UKAS audit – and he took it really seriously,” said Olywn.

“When the actual audit did come it was a breeze really because there was nothing that we hadn’t covered. We have so many monitoring systems on top of us for funding and we have to produce KPIs and outcomes on a monthly basis.

“ISO in a Box has done exactly what we needed it to do, the Equas  team have been great and I would really recommend them to other service organisations.”

CEO Peter Fowler

Westminster Group Plc includes in its Mission Statement the following phrase: “Westminster believes all citizens of the world have a right to personal safety, security and freedom from the threat of terrorist attack”.Mission statements are more often than not actually vision statements; ‘this is what we would like to do but we haven’t actually got there yet’. However,Westminster’s mission really is at the heart of its business, providing non-aggressive defence systems and equipment to authorised governments, multi nationals and the military to help protect personnel, facilities and national security.

The company has a truly global reach and clients include governments and blue chip organisations worldwide, such as the Royal Navy, US Air Force, the European Parliament, United Nations, MOD, Barclays Bank, The Atomic Energy Agency and even Amazon, the on-line retailer Westminster operates in over 45 countries with international offices and has a network of more than 80 agents (not the 007 ‘special agent’ variety!).

Operating in so many of the world’s ‘hot spots’ keeps the staff at Westminster very busy. They needed ISO9001 to be able to demonstrate to their customers that they were running the business within a recognised quality framework – and they needed it quickly.

Peter Fowler is the company’s CEO: “I’ve been involved with ISO over a number of years, right back to the days of BS5750. I know how time consuming it can be to try and build ISO 9001 in house and frankly, we didn’t have that luxury. We searched around for a company that we felt could deliver the right level of service,” said Peter.

“We are expanding rapidly and acquiring other businesses outside the UK so it was also important that our quality management system could be integrated globally. The Equas  consultant, Jonathan Lea, gave us a very good presentation and we could see that ISO in a Box would tick all the right boxes for us.

“He literally took the problem off our hands. Obtaining our certification was a smooth process; the Activ Online system works very well and is easy to manage – the software makes life much easier.

“I have to say that Jonathan’s sales pitch was very good but in truth, the implementation was even better,” concluded Peter.

Receptionists Diane Morse and Pauline Waterman

‘ISO in a Box’ was originally launched by Equas  as a simple and cost-effective tool to help SME’s achieve ISO9001 certification. Since then a number of sector-specific versions have been developed for industries including waste management, security – and even concrete repairers.

Now ‘ISO in a Box’ has proved to be the right prescription for Blackthorn Health Centre, which is part of the Hampshire Primary Care Trust. The healthcare sector has a number of very specific requirements that need to be integrated within its quality management system, as Angela Felton, system administrator at Blackthorn explained: “Things like medical directives, protocols and guidelines for our GPs are part of our working lives.

“We needed the system to incorporate all of this. I think that ISO9001 is based more on business requirements and we wanted it to work for us, rather than us having to adapt to it, so it was a learning curve for both organisations.

“ISO in a Box did provide the fundamentals – the building blocks on which we could build and we received our certification back in January. Our pre-audit was especially useful and the lady from the UKAS-accredited audit body, who carried it out, was brilliant and gave us some pointers where we could make things more measurable “We didn’t need to get ISO9001 but it was what the GPs wanted because we carry out a lot of our work under the Quality Outcomes Framework, which is moving towards a business management style.

“Now we’re a few months down the line, people are becoming more confident in using it and it’s much easier to access information they need. Every day, I get emails from people suggesting what new documents need to be added so it’s evolving all the time – ISO in a Box was definitely the right way to go, ” said Angela.

The Equas  consultant working with Blackthorn Health Centre is David Morgan. He said: “Every client’s business is unique and Blackthorn was a first for us as we hadn’t previously worked with a General Practice, although we already had considerable experience in the healthcare sector.

“The staff were extremely helpful in sharing information, working with us to tailor ISO in a Box to meet their requirements and, through their help, I’m confident that ISO in a Box now offers significant advantages for the healthcare sector.”