Go to QES Connect
Homepage
If you found this page from a search, please visit our web site at www.qesconnect.co.uk or click on the logo (left).
|
Go to QES Connect Homepage |
This page is provided by QES Connect Ltd., supplying Quality, Safety and Business Continuity Management solutions to business. If you found this page from a search, please visit our web site at www.qesconnect.co.uk or click on the logo (left). |
A. Large areas of business these days, especially Health & Safety are heavily governed by legislation. You are unlikely to have the time or inclination to become skilled enough to cover these areas as well as you would like. The consultant will provide rapid solutions to your problems, often from previous experience, saving you the learning time and the opportunity cost and allowing you to get on with the management of your business.
Q. Why are consultants so expensive?
A. You pay for a proportion of the consultant's investment in training and experience, much as you would in private medicine. He spends much of his time keeping abreast of legislation, new standards, new chemicals, new methods and so on. If you were to employ a specialist in these areas, your company would need to pay for time, course fees, etc. for him to keep up to date. This can double the effective cost of his "useful" time to the company, not to mention HR costs. Bearing this in mind, consultants give you a good deal, especially if you buy a support contract for one of the many support packages offered by consultancy firms these days.
A. When your resources are stretched beyond their capability to deliver. Help may be expertise or experience but it could be time. You know how, but customer orders won't wait, or that sales trip will take you away from the factory. Sometimes the message gets accepted more readily from an outsider - sometimes it helps if management is "seen to care". The independent and dispassionate view may help to put things into perspective.
Q. Why can't I get help from the enforcing authorities?
A. You can! The Health and Safety Executive publishes lots of useful information and advice including guidance on legislation, codes of practice, leaflets and booklets as training aids and so on. Although it is not an enforcing authority, the Chartered Quality Institute fulfils the same sort of role.
The difficulty lies in transferring the knowledge gained into useful input for your business. The authorities will not usually act in a consulting role specific to your company, and they will not develop implementation plans for you (except as part of an enforcement or prohibition notice!). You can expect your consultant to help you to develop your systems to match what is needed in a way that fits your company's cash flow and other resources. This can include training the workforce and providing independent inspection and auditing services as well as telling you what is needed.
Q. What if I am unhappy with the consultant's work?
A. Most consultants will have included an arbitration process within their terms and conditions. This provides the backstop in the event that you cannot resolve problems through normal discourse. For most consultants, work is often obtained by recommendation. It follows that disputes are bad news. They will usually avoid them altogether or try to settle them by reasonable means.
A. The set of processes that convert customer requirements into the product or service that the customer receives. It is NOT a series of documented procedures.
Q. Do I need a QMS for my company?
A. Most companies have some sort of system for managing the fulfilment of customer requirements. This is the essence of business after all. However, if that system has not been developed using generally accepted models, it is unlikely to be serving the company or its customers as well as it could. Lack of a QMS may show itself in many ways. Some examples are high levels of non-productive work, high levels of customer complaints, lost orders, insufficient growth or failure of new products in the market. Of course each of these could be addressed as they occur. An effective QMS will to be able to identify such things as risks to the business allowing procedures to be developed which prevent them from happening. In the end, only senior management can determine whether a QMS is needed.
Q. Do I need to register to ISO9001:2000?
A. No. You do not need to register unless your company needs to demonstrate conformance to this international standard. One reason for registration is the pressure from customers to show that your QMS is reliable and effective. Of course it covers aspects of your service to the customer as well as design or manufacturing quality. Another reason may be to avoid the need for customer audits. Regular auditing by the certification body will satisfy all but the most particular of customers. However, the benefit is principally in the effectiveness of the management system in helping your business. Registration may often be considered as an unnecessary luxury.
A. We are told, frequently by managers of older companies, that safety is largely a matter of common sense. But, despite "common sense", British Industry kills or injures several thousand employees and others every year . The cost of this is enormous, both in terms of pain and suffering for the victims and their families and lost time for the business. Add to this the cost of court appearances, legal expenses, fines and civil claims for compensation, much of which is uninsurable, and it becomes clear why companies should prevent such incidents from occurring.
Most of the Health & Safety legislation on the statute books comes from bitter experience of past incidents. Some regulations are specific to equipment, processes or chemicals and some are more general in nature. Of these, several impose absolute duties on managers of activities employing 5 or more people. These include a duty to document a Health and Safety Policy and Safety Arrangements for the company and to document Risk Assessments of the company's activities. The outcome of both these exercises should be made available to your employees so that they know what risks they may encounter and how such risks are to be controlled.
Q. Why can't I deal with Safety Management without help from a consultant?
A. Perhaps you can! The problem may be that there are seven major pieces of legislation (Acts and Regulations) and a host of less often encountered Regulations and codes of practice, all of which need to be taken into account when carrying out risk assessments. And, having identified the risks, suitable control measures need to be put in place to control the hazards identified so as to reduce the risks, so far as is reasonably practicable. Apart from the risk of injuries to your employees if something should go wrong, you would also be at risk of prosecution if it were found that you had not done all that was required. The key is to be able to demonstrate that you have done enough for the effective prevention of harm.
A large part of the consultant's investment is in the time required to keep up to date with the requirements of current legislation. This skill is part of what you pay for in his fees, and would otherwise represent a significant burden on your time as manager.
Q. How do I choose a consultant?
A. There are many criteria for choosing a consultant to help you.
The first requirement is the consultant's competence to cover most, if not all, of the requirements for your company's activities. This may come as a general statement of the company's capabilities or as a CV specific to the lead consultant for your work. Note that special services such as electrical testing and substance measurement are very often sub-contracted to qualified specialists.
Secondly, the consultant should provide you with a plan of the work to be carried out together with sufficient detail so that you know what to expect. The work should be priced together with the likely cost of any additional work found to be necessary. Many consultants will offer a free survey of your premises to allow them to provide a more accurate quotation. You should get a written report indicating areas of concern to back up their statement of work required.
Thirdly, you need to assess whether you can develop a working relationship between your workforce and the consultant. Those who deliver a report to your desk and then present their invoice before departing forever are unlikely to improve your safety management! Consider whether the consultant has understood your business needs. Whether in quality, safety or environmental protection, a consultant who gives you a list of actions that ensure 100% perfection, while not taking account of the costs to your business, is not really helping you to be successful, merely covering his backside. The best consultants will become almost a part of the organisation, providing you with useful effort including implementation of performance tracking methods and training of employees if required.
Fourthly, your consultant should show willingness to stick around. Will he carry out follow-up inspection or audit services? Does he offer a support contract? The latter will often provide "free" ongoing help with new legislation and day to day queries of the "How do I?" kind.
Lastly, can you afford him? Taking the over all view including risk of injuries, risk of prosecution and sleepless nights, the cost of an effective consultant is rarely excessive. For Health and Safety, the consultant represents a fuss-free way to address significant management issues for which the law says you must have solutions in place. They also provide you with the opportunity to match your company's spend to available cash flow. This is not an option with enforcement notices, fines or compensation payments.
Q. What will the consultant do?
A. If you accept his offer of a free survey, he will make an appointment to carry this out.
|
The survey.
| |
 |
The consultant will want to spend some time with you, typically half an hour or so, to obtain an understanding of your company, its safety policy, if you have one, and the extent to which safety arrangements have already been defined. After this he will expect to be given a tour of the operation, either by you or a senior member of the management of the activity to allow him to assess which regulations apply and the extent of compliance apparent through simple observation. He may seek to talk to employees but this is not essential at this stage. Time for this activity varies from half an hour to several hours depending upon the complexity of the operation.
|
|
The Quotation.
| |
|
The consultant will use information gathered from the survey to provide a quotation for services. This will sometimes include a written report detailing the observations made. The quotation will indicate those services requested by the customer and those additional services that the consultant may think are necessary to achieve full compliance. Some of the items may be open ended, requiring more detail before an absolute quote can be provided. For example, he may identify the need for COSHH assessments to be carried out for certain substances. He can only quote per substance until he knows precisely what substances are used in the activity. The same would apply to portable appliance testing or testing of local exhaust ventilation, for instance.
|
|
The Deal.
| |
|
Most consultants will seek to apply standard terms and conditions that will appear somewhere in the quote. However, you, the customer, will be under no obligation until you accept the quote and agree to the provision of services. You will usually have the option of accepting specific parts of the quote and determining the timescale for work to be carried out. You may expect the consultant to follow up delivery of the quote within a few days to see whether it is of interest to you. You should not let his enthusiasm deter you from obtaining competing quotes - remember the point about choosing your consultant. "The best consultants will become almost a part of the organisation..." |
A. Business continuity is about being able to continue to provide your product or service to your customer when events beyond your control have occurred. These might be power cuts, an influenza epidemic, a road accident injuring a specialist member of staff, or a fire in a neighbouring building that forces your staff to evacuate to a place of safety. Some disruptions are short term, others may extend over several hours or even days, but all will impact your ability to serve your customers (and thereby earn revenue).
The Business Continuity Management System incorporates your plans to deal with these events, both while they are happening and afterwards when you are trying to get up and running again.
Q. Isn’t this the same as having a Disaster Recovery Plan?
A. No, the disaster recovery plan is only part of the BCMS, covering the resumption of business when the emergency is over. The full BCMS involves gaining an understanding of how your business works, and what the critical dependencies are. Once you understand the critical processes and the resources they require, you can take steps to make your processes more robust, and so minimise the impact of the disruption.
A. If you are a small business, you are probably more vulnerable than big businesses that have multiple sites from where they can continue their business. You probably rely on a small number of key people whose absence could have a major impact on your business. Also, you are unlikely to be in a position where no competitor could step in and steal your customers.
Your customers want continued service, and if they move elsewhere while you are out of action, there is no guarantee they will return, so you need to be able to keep serving them. You need to consider the cost of a BCMS against the losses you would suffer in the short term and the long term from a business interruption.
Q. Why might I want BS25999 certification?
A. Customers will increasingly looking for reassurances that their suppliers and contractors can continue to serve them no matter what happens. The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 requires local authorities to have plans in place to maintain their own services, and to promote business continuity to the wider business community. If you are a supplier to a local authority or a large business, they may want assurances that you have an effective BCMS.
In the early days of quality management systems, there were multiple audits of suppliers by their customers, until independent certification to ISO9001 became the norm. Similarly we expect customers to want to assess your BCMS. The alternative way of responding to these enquiries will by having an assessment by an independent organisation to the recognised standard (BS25999).
|
Go to QES Connect Homepage |
This page is provided by QES Connect Ltd., supplying Quality, Safety and Business Continuity Management solutions to business. If you found this page from a search, please visit our web site at www.qesconnect.co.uk or click on the logo (left). |