2021 is already a big year for Inspired ECM! We are proud to announce that we have successfully achieved certification of our Quality Management System under the ISO 9001:2015 standard for the architecture, implementation, development, and support services of various IT platforms. Our audit was conducted, and we passed with flying colors!
From a high level, the ISO 9001:2015 standard aims to ensure that companies execute continuous quality by defining an architecture for providing services, which effectively means that we explicitly define our services to clients and are effective at delivering on them.
Throughout the lengthy process of obtaining the standard, businesses are forced to question many of their practices and restructure accordingly. Some of the requirements include:
- Determining the company’s strategic model, its relevancy, and how this may impact customer satisfaction
- Implementing metrics to be periodically reviewed, which can give insight into areas such as customer satisfaction and quality
- Defining member’s roles within the company (which processes they own) to better define how the quality management system will be fulfilled
- Determining company risks and the actions that can be taken to minimize them
Inspired ECM was most impacted in the following areas. We:
- Defined many risks for our business and customers and have put in place processes to mitigate against risk
- Defined and implemented a system where customer feedback directly impacts our Quality Management System
- Created a system where Inspired ECM evaluates contractors and employees based on their strengths and weaknesses in various technologies, past projects conducted with us, and customer feedback to best provision them for future projects
- Created new metrics that are actively monitored, which gives us insights into our performance and customer satisfaction
Most importantly, we have adopted the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) cycle, as our approach to quality management. This cycle is reflected in the three pillars of our business beliefs:
Customer Focus
Our customers are the reason we exist. We aim to meet or exceed their needs and expectations to make them successful. We will even try to anticipate their needs and introduce solutions they have not seen before in the spirit of true partnership. Our success depends upon each of our customer’s success.
Process Approach
To deliver on our commitment to total customer focus, we constantly work on our internal processes to maximize their effectiveness and efficiency. We recognize that it takes countless individual activities to deliver our products and services and that the process approach ties them all together. Our business is a process that transforms several inputs (customer requirements, resources, skilled employees, etc.) into an output that meets our customer’s needs. Within our business are several key processes that make it all work. Our processes are dependent upon one another and individually need continual attention and improvement. We are constantly challenging ourselves to refine and change how we do things to reduce the time it takes to get something done with the least errors. When errors do occur, we use them as opportunities to learn and improve. We are never satisfied with how things are working now and strive to raise our game every day.
Risk-Based Thinking
Looking ahead to anticipate what could happen is the reason we employ risk-based thinking throughout our organization. At several points in our process, we purposely stop and ask two probing questions:
What could go wrong?
Is there a way to improve?
This perspective of constantly watching for risks and opportunities leads us to action, which we carefully manage to ensure timely implementation and effective results. This gives us an attitude of being proactive to take advantage of every opportunity to improve.
We intend these three basic beliefs to cause our customers to stand up and take notice of the difference we provide to them daily.
We pride ourselves in upholding these standards and look forward to providing these benefits to future Inspired ECM customers.
