2020 has been an interesting year to say the least, I think we can mostly agree we never really expected to be attending virtual certification audit, or doing internal audits in our PJs. There are lots of video conferencing tools, but none seem to have become as ubiquitous as zoom. “To Zoom” has now become […]

Why do we manage health and safety hazards? Why do we reduce our environmental impacts? Why do we minimise the cost of poor quality? Why are we doing what we are doing?  The first three are easier to answer, we manage health and safety hazards to reduce the likelihood of people being hurt, we reduce […]

He’s checking his list, he’s checking it twice… If only compliance checking was as simple as “naughty” or “nice”! Management systems exist to drive continual improvement in an organisation, but all too often system processes, management control documentation and audits of the system itself are approached as a check-box exercise- an overly prescriptive and binary […]

Most of us think of waste in terms of materials that are no longer required, and have no other purpose. In this day and age, waste is so much more. Across the suite of ISO standards waste crops up as a consideration not just in ISO14001. Waste can be a fascinating subject and can be […]

Verification is an important sibling to audit. Whereas an audit endeavours to see evidence of conformity, verification is about substantiating a claim or a truth. Verification can often be seen as part of the output of a process; a classic example is batch verification to ensure conformity. Verification can be a useful tool to reduce […]

And the winner of the most overused and annoying word of 2020 goes to...... unprecedented!  These are indeed unprecedented times, but a little piece of my soul dies every time I read that phrase - particularly early in the pandemic, when every company I had ever bought anything from sent me an email telling me […]

Top Management is a term prevalent in Compliance circles, particularly in international standards. It refers to the Business Leaders, Senior Executives, SMTs, Directors, The Board, – each company may use different terminology but it refers to those who steer the company vision and direction, make policy, strategy and commercial decisions and take responsibility and accountability […]

The term Sustainability has been common business parlance for a long time now and has become a powerful, unifying concept for how business and society can exist and grow in harmony with the complex environmental systems that we reply on. The term Sustainability has also suffered from over-use and often ambiguous or tenuous application (see […]

Well it had to be really didn’t it? It is in the company name after all! To me, there is an important difference between risk management and risk assessment. Risk assessment is the daily process of identifying hazards, the associated risks and the required control measures - for example: Hazard – working in a chimney- […]