Quality Assurance

In 1997, Acre were concerned that as we grew we needed to have a more structured system in place to guarantee the quality of our work. Work started in March 98 to re-evaluate all our processes and rewrite our procedures manual, this process culminated in April 1999 with us reaching Accreditation ISO9001 (and 6 months later Schedule 12). This year, 2004, we upgraded to ISO9001 - 2000.

As we are an ISO accredited company we have in place a Customer Satisfaction and Complaints process. Because in some cases complaints are made verbally, we have a verbal record sheet to record these; the sheet is used for both positive and negative feedback and records if an acknowledgement is required.

Again these reports are discussed (depending on the statement made) at the quarterly management meeting, with the appropriate actions being issued (should it be negative) and recognition (where it is positive) to the employee concerned.

With any contract we endeavour to limit repeat calls, as we know this can create a financial burden and damage customer confidence. For these reasons we adopt a “Right First Time” culture and have processes in place to reduce long (on-site) attendance times. This is done by allowing a set time for the normal duty engineer to find the fault, if after that period they feel the fault is beyond them, they are immediately supported by a technician.

We also understand that some faults can be intermittent and hard to pin down, in these circumstances our technician will install monitoring devices to assist in isolating the fault.

The management of defects is assisted by our use of suppliers who are themselves quality accredited and have a process for tracking faulty components and claims.

We have also recently signed up to obtain the Investors in People Standard, which we hope to achieve in the next 12 months, reaffirming our commitment to our workforce.

Company registered in England #2707590
VAT registration #547761120