It is over two years since the country voted to leave the European Union but it is still on hold as our elected politicians cannot get their act together. We were promised a date at the end of March, then the end of May and now a long stop date of end of October. We are sure that business is fed up to the back teeth with all the uncertainty and additional costs that the delay has caused.  The additional ferries which were contracted to bring in supplies in the event of a no deal have been cancelled.  The cost is something in the region of ten million pounds with other measures being put on h ..read more

We at Quality Matters get through a good amount of paper and printing each month so it was a nuisance when our two year old Xerox Colorqube printer started to display tramlines down the centre of the print. We have had Xerox solid ink printers for some time and have found them to be excellent in terms of print quality and cost per page. Some time ago we had a fault where the paper would not feed from tray two and jammed. A local printer engineer tried to fix the problem but after replacing several parts over three visits gave up.  We would have to live with it, we were reluctant to user this ..read more

Annex SL was the major change to management standards which showed the world that it would be better to have all new standards having 10 identical numbered section.  The idea was that it would allow easier integration of systems and provide some form of commonality.   I think it fair to say that Annex SL was not widely acclaimed a success and was partly to blame for the decline in certifications, mainly ISO 9001. The standards published in 2015 are due for update anyway, so ISO decided that a revision to Annex SL would be in order.  Provisional issue date for Annex SL 2.0 is around 2020. It ..read more

This standard is probably the best know standard in the world, it is recognised in its full title in the UK as BS EN ISO 9001:2015.  We have covered this subject before but it is well worth doing it again. BS means it is an adopted British StandardEN means that it is adopted by EuropeISO means that it is adopted internationally There are over 6 million certifications worldwide and ISO 9001 has long been seen as an entry qualification to tenders and bids. The Standard is really good business practice and companies holding this qualification have risks and opportunities at the heart of their c ..read more

Just recently we received an email from the founder of Feedspot, Anuj Agarwal, to say that their panellist had selected our blogs to be in the top twenty of quality management blogs on the web.  We were awarded this in recognition: Readers of our blogs will know that we cover a wide range of subjects in the quality, environment and security areas and it is pleasing to see that these are read as far away as India. Anuj asked that we acknowledge the award and give him a mention, which we are happy to do. You can see the info on https://blog.feedspot.com/quality_management_blogs/ The offici ..read more