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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