Risk Assessments are not a one person job

I've been working with quite a large business over the last few weeks and during that time there have been a number of workshops undertaken. One of todays workshops was focused on risk and I have to say it produced a great result.

If you are performing any form of risk assessment (safety, environmental, commercial, technical etc) it pays to do it with a group of people all brain storming and making suggestions as opposed to one OH&S, Environmental, Financial Manager sitting at their desk nutting it out.

I have performed both kinds of risk assessment and it's easy to see which one is more beneficial.

Timeframe for building a Management System

One of the first questions I am always asked by potential clients is "How long will this take?" It is a difficult question to answer because if I say too short, I run the risk of not giving myself enough time to build the system and having to work for free for part of it. Or I can say too long making my price unrealistic.

Some people also expect you to be able to build a system within 3 days and pass an audit no problem.  Funnily enough these are also the same people that don't want to have any involvement in it and generally cause headaches. I tend to turn down those jobs.

In order to build an effective Management System I would suggest at a bare minimum without the assistance of a consultant 1-2 days a week for 2-3 months. This would take into account documenting your system, implementation, auditing, corrective actions and review. With the assistance of a consultant you can shorten this as the learning curve is not as steep. This is assuming you are a small to medium business with around 5-25 employees. 

The main variable however is how complex your business is. For example you may be a large business with a lot of people, however your processes are very simple as opposed to a small business with complex processes. As an example a cleaning business with 250 employees would have less complicated systems than a microchip manufacturer employing 10 people. 

These days I err on the side of caution. I would rather say more time than I think it needed and come in under budget than get halfway through and realise there is no way I will be able to finish the system with the amount of time I've given myself. I've done both and I know which one feels better. 

Reduction of petrol consumption as an Environmental Objective

If you are building a new Environmental Management System and one of your high impacts is the use of vehicles, I highly recommend against using the reduction of petrol consumption as an environmental objective.

It's a pain in the butt to measure and it can also be majorly effected by the growth of your business. 

As an example if you run a small manufacturing business and do a lot of deliveries, you may have vehicle use as one of your aspects. You could set reduction of petrol consumption as an objective but if you have a high growth period and need to do more deliveries you aren't going to meet those objectives.

you're better off setting reduction of unecessary travel as an objective which will give you the same result but allow for growth.

The way I have structured this with one of my clients is by printing the most efficient route to each of their major clients using the www.whereis.com website. This tells you exactly how far it is from the office to the client. The driver then writes down their start and end km's on their delivery docket and it can be matched to how far they should have travelled. Set the objective that no trips should exceed 2km's from the designated route.

This way you can be sure there is no unecessary travel and keep fuel consumption to essential travel only.

1000 views

This blog finally hit 1000 views this morning. Thanks everyone for reading and I hope the articles have helped in some way.

The Cost of Quality

There has been a debate on Linkedin and a couple of other forums raging for some time now. The topic being that there is no cost to quality.

The argument for this statement is that if managed properly, any costs associated with quality will be offset by improvements in efficiency, product and profit. The article below has some really good information about measuring the cost of quality.

http://www.platinumregistration.com/kbfiles/qp0906cokins.pdf

In a perfect world I agree with the statement. If you put effective processes in place that allow you to identify and correct issues early, you will save yourself A LOT of time and money. Finding an issue early in the process chain is a lot cheaper to fix than having it discovered by the customer at the end of the process.

The only time quality isn't cost effective is when it isn't managed properly. If your systems are weak and your Quality Manager is lazy you might as well scrap it all together. Having a system in place and not performing regular audits, identifying non-conformances and continually improving the system is a waste of time and although it may help you win a tender, it won't help you keep the business in the long run.

Accreditation Vs Certification

It's a quiet Monday and I don't have much to blog about but I thought I would comment on something that I find irritating, people using the word Accreditation in place of Certification (especially when consultants and auditors say it that should know better).

Businesses are Certified to ISO Standards, third party certification bodies are accredited.

For example if your business is being audited then you are going for ISO certification and are being audited by an accredited third party, not the other way around. 

Anyway thats the end of my rant for the morning. Remember you are ISO certified not accredited.

Why Certification is Important in a Recession

If you read the news every day it's doom and gloom and we will all be poor and living on the streets in no time. Unfortunately it's usually the media that starts the fear in consumers and creates the doom and gloom it has predicted.

For many businesses work may start to dwindle as people tighten their belts which means your competitors will be searching for more and more ways to gain the upper hand. The bottom line is if you tender for work and your competitor submits the same price and is offering the same level of service, but has a certified Management System, most of the time you will lose.

From the customer point of view the certified business is a lower risk. You know they have to meet strict guidelines in terms of measuring customer satisfaction, have to regularly audit their processes and in the case of safety and environmental regularly review compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. Would you pick the company that just says they do it or has to regularly prove they do it?

Government work is also one of the key areas that remains fairly stable during a downturn. Lucrative government tenders now always include QA, Safety and Environmental Certification in their tender review. With so many companies bidding for the work it pays to get all the points you can.