Kicking some more quality goals at Pryors Apparelmaster
The Apparelmaster Group congratulates Pryors Apparelmaster on achieving new ISO Certifications, as well as renewing currently held certifications. Pryors Apparelmaster were pleased to advise that, after hundreds of hours spent reviewing processes, consulting with staff, updating current documents and developing new ones and then a gruelling two-and-a-half-day audit undertaken by external quality auditors Telarc Limited, they have renewed their ISO 9001 Quality Management Certification and stepped it up a notch by successfully achieving new certifications with Environment ISO 14001 and Health and Safety ISO 45001.
The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), founded in 1947, is recognised worldwide as the authority on quality management.
We see our participation in this certification process as an investment in our customers by providing you with the best product and service possible and maintaining a supportive working environment for our team, both which we believe, is core to our future success as a strong resilient, forward thinking organisation.
What does this mean for you, our customers?
You can be assured we are locking in best practices based on international standards and therefore operating with strong benchmarks for ongoing improvement. Processes are in place to track and resolve issues quickly and effectively and any improvement actions are based on real data not speculation or guesswork.
ISO 9001 is about ensuring all processes and guidelines are documented and well established and that they are easily followed by anyone making it easy to provide training, work through change and troubleshoot. Together these ensure quality outputs for you our valued customers and you can confidently report back to your own customers about the quality we adhere to as part of your own supply chain.
What does this mean for our team?
Our people are more satisfied and motivated in their work when they clearly understand what they are required to do and how. ISO 9001 ensures systems are in that constantly deliver training and enhance our greatest resource, our people. Our high staff retention and low absenteeism rates reflect strong staff engagement levels.
Having processes established and guidelines in place also means we can continue to operate effectively in the absence of key people without undue pressure on other team members.
2020 has been a tough one for many of us and we are incredibly proud of our team. We believe, having the right systems in place played a bit part in making it possible for us to keep all staff employed through Covid. In addition, this year we applied the living wage rate across our organisation as well as providing our staff with a 4-day week, giving them an opportunity for greater work/life balance.
Introducing Health and Safety ISO 45001:2018 and Environment 14001
Health and Safety: With the cessation of the ACC Workplace accredited employers programme, specifically the Workplace Safety Management Practices (which we had in place) we felt it was important to our business, staff and customers to hold ourselves accountable to another external benchmark and therefore, completed the new ISO 45001:2018 Health and Safety standard.
This ensures that we actively continue to integrate OH&S management processes into all our business processes so they are a natural part of our every day routine and that all employees at every level are actively participating. We don’t use “things have always been done like this” as a control measure and actively find ways to adapt work to our workers to ensure high staff engagement in our organisation.
Environment: Pryors Apparelmaster has, since 2009, worked with Auckland based independent Carbon and Sustainability Company AST, whose Instep Carbon and Sustainability Programme has been a cornerstone for its environmental reporting and management programme. In effect, we were already meeting 90% of the requirements of ISO’s Environment 14001 Environmental Management standards so we thought it was a no brainer to give ourselves a push and raise the bar a bit more to achieve ISO’s environmental certification. Laundries are known to be water and energy hungry and we are continually striving to prove this is not the case and take great pride in achieving positive steps in the right direction year on year and we know this is important to our environmentally conscious customers too.