Automation and materials handling supplier Wittmann UK has renewed its accreditation to the ISO 9001:2000 quality assurance standard.
Automation and materials handling supplier Wittmann UK has renewed its accreditation to the ISO 9001:2000 quality assurance standard. Wittmann UK was one of the first UK companies to achieve the new international quality standard, launched in January 2001. The new accreditation will run for the next two years with mandatory further inspections and evaluations at twelve month intervals.

Barry Hill, Wittmann UK managing director says that ‘the new standard has assured our clients and competitors that our own-designed product, manufacturing and quality standards are guaranteed, and that we back those guarantees with audited and traceable management systems.’ Hill adds that ‘maintaining the new ISO 9001:2000 involves a considerable amount of continuous improvement and no little cost to ourselves.

It is however a required price to pay in order to remain a first tier supplier to manufacturing industry.

Modern companies can no longer rely on contacts and goodwill alone.

You need verifiable and provable systems.

QA qualified companies want to talk the same language with like-minded and like-qualified suppliers.’ Wittmann UK passed a fresh audit assessment to renew its qualification.

The company’s processes will now be reassessed annually - internally and by National Quality Assurance (NQA) - over the next two years.

Wittmann UK’s process of assessing its suppliers has yielded significant gains over the past 12 months.

Wittmann UK’s ISO 9001:2000 award is for ’sales, design, manufacture, installation and servicing of automation systems for the plastics and manufacturing industries.’ Much of it is streamlined around a simple slogan - ‘Plan-Do-Check-Act’; one which is becoming more widely adopted in industry and which repeats for each process stage of the order until the order has been fulfilled to the customer’s satisfaction.

The new ISO 9001:2000 quality standard places a much greater emphasis on customer focus and employs techniques that view the organisation as a set of interacting processes.

The standard more easily allows the successfully-qualified company to develop, for example: continual improvement; consistent control; training; improved marketing; all leading to a possible reduction in insurance premiums.

Industry criticisms of the previous (1994) standard included: over-emphasis on documentation; no addressing of customer satisfaction; too many standards in the series, and duplication with other standards (eg ISO 14001).

Wittmann is one of the world’s leading producers of robots, automation and materials handling equipment for plastics and other manufacturing industries, with production plants in the USA as well as Austria, Hungary and the UK.