Certification Providers – You Have a Choice
Choose a certification provider as you would any other service provider and base your decision on price, service and quality. Just remember, you can only ever have 2 of these 3 attributes. Be comfortable with the two you want. Unfortunately, not all of the certification providers give quality service. There are many contributing factors to this, but three predominant reasons are; lack of client service; poor 'back office' support; and inadequate client facing personnel.
So, if you are not getting what you expected or not getting what you were promised, contact your provider and get them to fix the situation. After all, you are investing a great deal of time and resources to your certification, make sure you are getting what you deserve. If they can't (or won't) adapt their service levels, change providers. If you must change your provider, you can. The exercise is relatively simple and it should be 'free' (but that is another newsletter / blog).
The ticks and other logos
Did you know that there is only one company in the whole wide world who can issue a quality management system certificate to ISO 9001 with those 5 white ticks? Yes, only one. Did you know that that certification service provider is only one of thirty plus service providers in Australia. There are hundreds worldwide. Each and every one of them uses a different certification logo, different certification brand.
The key point is, that any accredited certification provider (and the official description is a “Certified Accreditation Body”) can generate a bona vide certification certificate recognised worldwide. It means the company that has been certified has been assessed and adjudged the same as all service providers in this field. It just has a different logo. A bit like getting your Compulsory Third Party car insurance from different insurers. Different company, different logo, same insurance.
As the certification market continues to mature and certified companies realise the logo is not the be all and end all, it will be the true value adding service providers who will prevail. Those same certified companies will then realise the full benefits of an effective quality management system is the reward in itself.