I have been working with Tomoe Valve Ltd on behalf of ConsultQA to transition the existing ISO 9001:2008 quality management system to meet the requirements of the 2015 standard. Tomoe Valve Ltd is situated in Newport and manufactures, assembles, tests, stocks, markets and sells any of the Tomoe Valve Ltd range of butterfly valves throughout the world. Their valves can be found operating in a wide range of industries including oil and petrochemical, processing and power generation, marine applications, brewing and distilling, water treatments and vehicle manufacture.

The Newport factory is housed in a purpose-built, fully equipped facility with two business units:

• Triple Offset which designs, manufactures, assembles, tests, markets and sells the triple offset butterfly range of bespoke, custom built valves
• Sales and Distribution which markets, sells, assembles, tests the Tomoe range of butterfly valves, stock is also held for short lead times

The quality management system required simplifying which we achieved by re-structuring, re-writing and updating the manual to match the business processes, we could then simplify the existing procedures and in some cases were able to remove them completely. We also updated the policy statement with the involvement and buy in from the Managing Director and Senior Management Team.

We received very good feedback from the Lloyds Register auditor and we were really pleased to receive a recommendation for transition to ISO 9001:2015.

I worked very closely with the Senior Quality Engineer and Production Manager during the project and we received the following testimonial from the Production Manager:

“Thank you for your help and valued support during this transition period and we look forward to a long and fruitful relationship going forward.”

ConsultQA are going to be providing internal auditing resource for Tomoe so I’m looking forward to being back in Newport in September.