News Issue 2 December 2013
The challenge of finding the
right skill set in recruiting staff,
particularly engineers, affects
security industry manufacturers
and is recognised right across
industry.
The latest report to suggest how this
problem can be addressed has been produced
by Professor John Perkins and was published
by BIS in November. The report makes 22 main
recommendations – including more support
for the Tomorrow’s Engineers programme in
schools. To read the report -
Click Here.PSSA
Member News.
Following an in depth assessment Broughton adopted a completely
different direction for their well-established ISO9001 system, entirely
replacing the existing audit regime with an innovative behavioural
assessment system. This system employs 3rd party certification by
HPO’s UKAS accredited certification body; HPA.
The system includes a number of fairly radical ideas, but the features
that really interested and inspired the Broughton team were:
• The system uses a clever process to regularly gather the percep-
tions of employees, customers, suppliers and stakeholders, then
process this information through some unique algorithms. This
process pin-points any potential weaknesses in the organisation’s
systems and procedures. Unlike traditional ISO9001 systems
which spread focus over the entire organisation on a sequential
rota basis, and regardless of whether this adds any value, this
allows the focus of all energy and resource just on the current risk
areas.
• From these algorithms the system provides a continuous scoring
across all the organisation’s processes. This allows targets to be
set and monitored for improvement, and efforts/resources to be
used most effectively i.e. to be increased or reallocated to differ-
ent areas depending on improvement rates.
• By focusing on business and customer outcomes this system
recognises that customer service delivery is the result of many
departments and processes and not any one in isolation; it looks
at an entire delivery system. Traditional methods can perfect one
or several specific areas yet still let customers down or produce
poor output in total.
• The system recognises that it is people’s behaviour that delivers
customers’ results and products, not bits of paper and docu-
ments. By focusing just on the current risk areas, this applies
resource to improvement, rather than trying to define everything
that takes place before it happens and tying everyone up in ever
increasing amounts of detail that divert attention from real prob-
lems and don’t really control anything.
• The management team were very happy with the initial overall
results, indicating a good general satisfaction of customer re-
quirements, but were also surprised by others. A number of areas
were shown to have potential risks and improvements are already
being made; improvements the team are sure would not even
have been identified by a traditional ISO9001 system, regardless
of the amount of resources used!
Broughton move beyond ISO9001, replacing traditional auditing with on line
behavioral assessment system
On an annual basis, Broughton’s management team re-launch an ongoing project to find the next step forward to further
raise customer outcomes, satisfaction, and business efficiency.
Wanting to build on existing ISO 9001 quality systems, but very aware of the short-comings of most ISO9001 systems, the
team were determined to not just add further endless tick- box checking associated with the methodology of traditional
auditing. Recent huge failures at for instance Stafford Hospital, Deepwater Horizon, and across the whole financial sector
indicated that continually extending conventional systems gives no guarantee of improvement and in fact can give false
confidence while catastrophic failures develop unseen. The challenge was to find a simple system that reliably and solidly
indicates where the current risks to the delivery of high quality business, and customer outcomes really lie.
From work with the PSSA; the High Security Industry’s Association (Broughton’s MD
is also chairman of the PSSA), and being the first Company through the PSSA’s
Product Verification Scheme, Broughton had first-hand experience of some
innovative work Pioneered by an outfit called the High Performance
Organisation (HPO).
Perkins Review
of Engineering
Skills
03