It will give confidence to your customers that an accredited independent body (GIC) has assessed your system and has demonstrated that you have the capability to deliver goods and services that will consistently meet their needs. It also acts as a focus within your own company to develop best practice and promote continual improvement.
The certification cycle is three years from granting a certificate. It is your responsibility to maintain and improve your system, focusing on processes for delivering good products and services to your customers. GIC will conduct periodic surveillance visits to sample the system. After three years a full reassessment is conducted.
GIC encourages you to always look for ways to improve your processes from initial enquiries through to delivery of product and services to your customers. As long as the improvement made was part of your formal system this is seen as a positive activity. Areas for improvement can often be identified during your internal audits.
The most common standard used is quality management standard ISO9001. This has been adopted world wide as the benchmark by which to measure a company's systems capability. The principles it encompasses can be applied to any company. These are effective leadership, customer focus to meet both stated and implied needs, a systemic approach based on well designed and managed processes, decisions based on hard data, not intuition, good relationships with suppliers, involvement of people, utilising skills and experience of your workforce and emphasis on continual improvement.
Yes, international standards recognise that business is conducted in many different ways. Regardless of the size of your company, GIC will adjust the duration of the assessment to take that into account. The standards also define products in four ways; hardware, software, processed material and services. Your company may have one or a combination of these things. GIC will assist you to define a scope for your products that will be assessed and appeared on your certificate.
We strongly recommend that you do not seek certification from any certification body that is not accredited by one of the world recognised accreditation bodies. Such certification is worthless. GIC is accredited by two leading accreditation bodies, namely UKAS and JAS-ANZ. This accreditation means that you can have every confidence that our auditors will conduct a professional and independent assessment of your organisation that will be recognized in all the markets of the world.
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