Elite Celebrates Successful ISO Audit

Elite Group successfully passes ISO 9001, 27001 and 22301 audit!

After an intense 12 day audit, Elite Group successfully passed our ISO 9001, 27001 and 22301 accreditations. It wasn’t an easy feat, as this time we incorporated our offices in the Isle of Man, Wrexham and Stoke into our Elite Group ISO accreditations. However, we are so pleased that all offices are now ISO accredited, as this means our processes across all offices are efficient, effective and capable of ensuring that our customers receive the best service possible. To achieve these accreditations is a massive achievement in themselves. However, the fact we managed to successfully traverse the challenges posed by completing an important audit in the midst of a global pandemic, is nothing short of extraordinary and we could not have achieved this without the hard work of our staff! The team pulled together to ensure everything was in order and was on hand to demonstrate their knowledge of our processes and we could not be more grateful for their support, dedication and team work.

You may be wondering what the ISO audit entails and how it helps our business and our customers? Wonder no more! We’ll explain exactly what the ISO accreditations mean for Elite and our service!

What are ISO accreditations?

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) accreditations are management certifications which demonstrate that our service meets the expectations of our customers. There are many different accreditations that outline different aspects of businesses but the 3 we hold are:

• ISO 9001 – this accreditation highlights the quality of a business’s management system. It shows that we have a structure that we follow within our service and ensures that our customers receive a top-level and consistent service.
• ISO 27001 – covers our information security to ensure that we establish, implement, maintain and continually improve our information security processes to ensure our company and customer data is kept safe. It helps us with our GDPR compliance and shows that we take the security of our data seriously.
• ISO22301 – assesses our business continuity to ensure we have put systems in place that prevents disruption to the business and also allows us to effectively deal with disruptions to prevent interruption to our service.

The way that the audit works is an assessor follows the customer journey, throughout the different departments within our business and ensures our processes meet the criteria set out by the ISO standards. This is the first year that we have incorporated the 3 accreditations into all of our offices and we are so pleased that this has been successful. It means that all offices are following ISO standards every day and working within effective systems and processes. The stand-out feature of our service, which was highlighted within the audit, was our online service portal – ServiceNow. It’s proven to be an invaluable resource, both for our team and for our customers. It allows us to monitor our performance and deliver on our customer SLA’s, as well as provide a space where customers can quickly and easily request support from us. Through attaining the ISO accreditations, we have demonstrated that compliance underpins everything we do. Our business and the service that we offer is built upon strong foundations made up of clear systems and efficient processes.

Team Elite

Our successful audit demonstrated that our team is our best asset. We’d like to say thank you to Melissa Carter, our outstanding Compliance Officer for handling the audit, alongside our Technology Director, Greg Voller and his team who did fantastic work for the ISO 27001 and 22301 accreditations. Alongside these key individuals, we would like to extend our thanks to everybody in Team Elite for their contribution to audit, especially those who were chosen to represent their respective teams and offices including:

• Paul Bachan – his knowledge of Microsoft Visio and processes was invaluable to the operation
• Tim Cass – for doing a sterling job representing the Isle of Man team
• Matt Kingsley-Williams – for expertly representing the Wrexham office and for providing expert stats and figures for Operations
• Lucy Shuttleworth – an absolute testament to the Provisioning team with her fantastic knowledge
• Rachael Dovey – our internal account manager who brilliantly represented her department
• Paul Lakeland – for fantastic demonstration of his role within the Sales team
• Jack Murphy – for brilliantly representing the Internal IT Team
• James Dawson and Alex Farrell – for excellent representation for the Software Development Team
• Helen Thomas – for an incredible demonstration of the ServiceNow dashboard
• Laura Williams – for being an outstanding representative for the HR team
• Ben Whymark – for providing impressive stats and information on ServiceNow

Having to answer questions during an audit is always daunting, but our team handled it so well and the expertise they displayed was very impressive. This year was more challenging than most due to many of the auditing sessions having to be completed online via Microsoft Teams, but once again, our team showed resilience and impeccable professionalism – we could not be more proud!

What’s next?

At Elite, we’re always looking to improve our service and ensure our customers have a great experience when working with us. Despite the challenge of working towards three accreditations, we’re now looking work towards the ISO 45001 accreditation which is all about Health & Safety. Further to this, we are always open for improvement and are consistently looking for areas we can improve within our services and standards we can incorporate into our business processes and systems. Our customers are our priority, so we are completely open to suggestions from them regarding our service and any ISO accreditations or other external certifications we should include within our journey to improve our service.