Using continual improvement to deliver real value

If you are a typical LRQA customer, you will have found that during the early years of introduction and implementation of your management system, measurable benefits were fairly easy to identify.

In this article, Sandy Sutherland, Corporate Technical Manager for LRQA explores a number of issues about ensuring management systems deliver continual improvement.

As time passes, it probably becomes a little more difficult to maintain that rate of improvement. Left alone, the effectiveness of your management system may not only cease to improve, but it will probably also gradually decline in effectiveness.

Your management review, corrective and preventive actions and other related activities should not only be countering any such decline; they should be producing some discernable improvements in the performance of the management system. However, to deliver real value, your continual improvement efforts ideally should focus on what really matters to you and your customers.

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A best practice approach

Like you, LRQA also has to continually improve its processes. Your feedback indicates that you expect LRQA assessors to gain a thorough understanding of what is important to you and your customers, and to use that as a basis for adding value. Feedback from major purchasing organisations, regulators and other interested parties indicates they expect to see improved performance as a result of certified organisations improving the effectiveness of their management systems. As part of our Business Assurance response to these challenges, LRQA is introducing a ’best practice’ approach to the assessment of continual improvement, not only to enhance intrinsic value, but also to give increased confidence that organisations will consistently deliver on the promises they have made.

During the assessment, our assessors need to agree with you not only what is important to you, your customers and other stakeholders, but also how this relates to your planned areas of improvement, so there can be confidence that these aspects are represented and addressed. LRQA will, as we have always done, look at how the organisation’s senior management have set out the overall commitments of the organisation through its missions, visions, values, strategies, policies and objectives, and relate these to the need to achieve continual improvement. Throughout this process, our focus will be on those aspects and potential improvements to the effectiveness of the management system that will really make a difference to what matters to you and your customers.

LRQA assessors will work with you so that they gain a clear understanding of what your company wants to achieve over the three-year certification cycle. Once you have set your improvement objectives, LRQA assessors will look at what you are doing and how you are achieving the planned improvement objectives.

First | Previous | Next | Last

A best practice approach

Like you, LRQA also has to continually improve its processes. Your feedback indicates that you expect LRQA assessors to gain a thorough understanding of what is important to you and your customers, and to use that as a basis for adding value. Feedback from major purchasing organisations, regulators and other interested parties indicates they expect to see improved performance as a result of certified organisations improving the effectiveness of their management systems. As part of our Business Assurance response to these challenges, LRQA is introducing a ’best practice’ approach to the assessment of continual improvement, not only to enhance intrinsic value, but also to give increased confidence that organisations will consistently deliver on the promises they have made.

During the assessment, our assessors need to agree with you not only what is important to you, your customers and other stakeholders, but also how this relates to your planned areas of improvement, so there can be confidence that these aspects are represented and addressed. LRQA will, as we have always done, look at how the organisation’s senior management have set out the overall commitments of the organisation through its missions, visions, values, strategies, policies and objectives, and relate these to the need to achieve continual improvement. Throughout this process, our focus will be on those aspects and potential improvements to the effectiveness of the management system that will really make a difference to what matters to you and your customers.

LRQA assessors will work with you so that they gain a clear understanding of what your company wants to achieve over the three-year certification cycle. Once you have set your improvement objectives, LRQA assessors will look at what you are doing and how you are achieving the planned improvement objectives.

First | Previous | Next | Last