Siemon EMEA headquarters and manufacturing centres achieve ISO 9001:2015 recertification

Siemon has announced that its EMEA headquarters in Chertsey, UK and EMEA manufacturing and logistics centre in Brno, Czech Republic have achieved recertification to the latest revision of the ISO 9001 quality management standards by Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance (LRQA).

To achieve this status, LRQA conducted a full system audit of both EMEA locations as well as Siemon’s global headquarters in Watertown, Connecticut, its Shanghai, China and Tijuana, Mexico locations. With five facilities on three continents now re-certified to ISO 9001:2015 Siemon is one of the first companies to accomplish this milestone.

The ISO 9001 standard defines best practices of a quality management system for the design, manufacturing, installation and services provided by an organisation. Following more than three years of revision work by experts from nearly 95 participating and observing countries, the International Standards Organisation released the 2015 revision of the standard last September. With the new requirements there is a strengthened emphasis on leadership and management commitment, including actively engaging and taking accountability for the effectiveness of the management systems. There is also a focus on objectives as drivers for improvement and to measure, monitor and analyse performance.

“We have always aligned both our quality management and our environmental management systems with our business strategy, so when the new ISO standard was released, Siemon had a significant advantage with many of the systems requirements already in place. After a rigorous review, we only needed to slightly refine some practices and update documentation,” explains Dusan Burget, EMEA operations manager and global logistics analyst at Siemon. “For example, our system requirements apply to all Siemon employees and are not limited to manufacturing, and we have mature management systems that are based on a ‘plan-do-check-act’ continuous improvement process. We also have systems already in place to understand and align our processes with economic and environmental developments, technology innovations, regulatory developments, organisational culture and changing societal needs.”

The new ISO 9001:2015 standard replaces previous editions, and companies looking to achieve recertification have three years to comply with the new ISO standard. While many are still in the process of working toward recertification, less than 1% of certified companies have passed recertification and have been recommended for certification to the 2015 revision of the standard by LRQA. Siemon is proud to be one of the few and one of the first to achieve this milestone.