Posts Tagged ‘ISO 9001’

Maintaining High Standards – Renewing our ISO 9001 Accreditation

Published on Nov 2nd, 2011 by James

I remember sitting my exams at school and asking myself why I was so nervous when all I had done all year was stay focused, work hard and be thorough with my work? A similar feeling crept up on me last Thursday when I arrived at Northstar’s Ebury Street offices to greet our ISO 9001 auditor from the British Assessment Bureau. The idea that our fate was in the auditor’s hands is a scary one even though the result was actually all down to our own hard work over the year since we were accredited.

Half a day later and we emerged proud and inspired. After commenting that our supplier evaluation database was “the best he had ever seen” (thanks to some fantastic programming by Katia), the auditor left us with some observations to consider for the future and accredited us again … for a further 12 months.

With ISO, we have not only increased the efficiency and quality standards of the business but we can also identify best practices for our industry simply through operational adherence. You soon see that tracking changes to proposals greatly aids in knowing who called, when and to say what.

It has been an all year round, all staff effort especially bearing in mind the schedule of internal audits we have organised! For that I have to thank the Quality Team (Liz, Jess & Katia – I can’t really thank myself can I?!) and all the Northstar staff who have put so much effort to keep the ball rolling and in ensuring the Northstar is the best it can be.

 

 

ISO Accreditation – Is it worth it?

Published on Feb 6th, 2011 by Jessica

Early in 2010, Northstar decided to embark on the process of gaining ISO 9001:2009 accreditation.

There has been a lot of debate within the research industry over the last year about the relevance and importance of this for research agencies. This is something we did consider when moving forward with our decision: it was a time-consuming process and it required us implementing some additional paperwork in our processes. Ultimately however, we felt that it was an important stamp of recognition for clients and others to show how seriously we take quality control within our company.

To be fair to our team, many processes were already in place and just required documenting, but it forced us all to have a look at what we do and how we might be able to improve things, which ultimately benefit our clients and suppliers, as well as us.

Since late last year, Northstar have been fully accredited with ISO 9001:2008. Hopefully, our clients haven’t noticed any changes, we like to think that it has just improved our systems internally, but if it has resulted in greater satisfaction then it was well worth our time and hard work. (And thanks to our new client satisfaction processes, we’ll have a better idea of final levels of satisfaction!).