Almost a year after the start of AARC Professional Services’ journey towards ISO 9001 certification, I’m pleased to be able to announce the news that we have now received the official ISO 9001 kitemark from awarding body BSI (You can read more about BSI here – https://www.bsigroup.com/en-AE/About-BSI/).
To begin with however, an obvious question – what is ISO 9001 and why the need to attain it? Recognised as the world’s most widely adopted Quality Management System (QMS), ISO 9001 is a standard that can benefit any organisation, whatever its size, and is designed to be a powerful business improvement tool. The ISO 9001 quality management system helps those who successfully attain it to monitor and manage quality across their respective organisations, with a focus on the following five key areas:
- Client expectation – Helping to identify customer needs, assess future requirements and measure client satisfaction
- Compliance – Making sure all regulatory requirements are met for your products and service, communicating the relevant regulatory requirements to your employees and interested parties
- Improvement – Supporting risk assessment, opportunities for continuous improvement and the need to implement operational controls to effectively manage and measure performance
- Reputation – Demonstrating your commitment to quality products and services via certification to the most widely recognised international system standard, ISO 9001, as well as supporting safeguards around the quality of the products and services you provide
- Engagement – Requiring the identification of all internal and external stakeholders relevant to the business’s Quality Management System to make sure their respective needs are met, as well as communicating the quality policy to all employees (to enable them to contribute) and actively demonstrating how the business meets customer needs and regulatory/statutory requirements
A commitment to ISO 9001 is also a commitment to continually improve/streamline operations and reduce costs, win more business and compete in tenders, improve customer satisfaction, build resilience and a more sustainable business, demonstrate strong corporate governance and work more effectively with customers/clients, stakeholders and the supply chain.
In view of the above and as an organisation committed to providing clients (and indeed the wider rail industry) with outstanding outcomes – a key part of which is how we embed quality in all that we do whilst also keeping the wheels of continuous improvement turning – AARC Professional Services took a conscious decision to highlight this commitment by putting our quality management systems to the test via the ISO 9001 process. This way, we could actively demonstrate our understanding of what good quality management systems look like, sharing this best practice with our clients. The fact that over a million organizations globally have improved their businesses with the ISO 9001 quality management system standard wasn’t lost on us either!
Once a firm decision had been taken by myself and the relevant members of the business, not least our Transport Systems and HSQE Specialist Liz Parkes, to submit for ISO 9001, we set off on the road to certification in early 2024, with Liz leading the way. The process itself involved audits of AARCPS’s quality management systems in June and September of last year, with Liz, myself and a number of our associates helping to demonstrate a collective commitment to identifying, meeting and exceeding customer/stakeholder requirements – central to the ISO 9001 process.
As we already work closely with all of our clients and stakeholders across the rail industry to actively encourage innovation and support a strong safety culture whilst constantly striving to find new ways to improve our services and outcomes, the journey towards ISO 9001 certification has formed a natural part of this process. It is also a further demonstration of our professional credentials and our commitment to providing the highest standards possible in all that we do for our clients and the wider rail industry. And in the year that the company celebrated its 10th anniversary, the timing seemed perfect.
The official ISO 9001 certification also comes as AARC Professional Services enhances its service offering, from an initial focus on Rail Operations, Safety & Assurance, Rail Operations Training and Projects & Engineering, to now include Rail Infrastructure and specifically the management of operational assets including rail engineering and rail maintenance. And with the addition of the ISO 9001 kitemark, we are able to actively demonstrate how we provide all of these services whilst keeping the wheels of continuous improvement turning, working hard to embed quality into everything that we do. This helps us not only meet but exceed expectations and is a further demonstration of our professional credentials and commitment to delivering the highest standards possible for our clients and the rail industry. I’ll close this latest blog with a special thanks to Liz and everyone else within the business who played a part in getting us to where we are. Here’s to a safe and successful 2025.
