Applying for a tender? Do you need ISO certification?
Having an ISO certification is almost always a prerequisite when tendering for government and private organisation contracts. It may well make the difference between winning and losing a tender.
Tenders include Quality, Safety and Environmental ISO certification criteria to provide the organisation issuing the tender with an assurance that you have appropriate business management systems in place to deliver the goods and services as specified in the tender, as well as comply with all legal requirements including Safety and the Environmental laws. It also demonstrates your organisation has undertaken a commitment to establishing and implementing best practice business processes and continual improvement.
What is ISO certification?
ISO certification is, simply put, a document that tells your customers that you have an operating system that complies with a set of standards recognised by international or industry bodies. The most common standards include ISO 9001 (Quality), ISO 14001 (Environment) and ISO 45001 (Safety).
What are the benefits?
As a third party has confirmed your system’s compliance with set standards, systems certification improves our ability to prove your systems exist to the required standard. Often, if you maintain the required certification, you can skip large sections of returnable tender documentation. This creates efficiencies in the process and reduces your overall submission spend.
As well as benefiting your bids and tenders, the ISO certification has numerous additional benefits. Due to the ISO standards being recognised and highly valued internationally, the certification can add credibility to your organisation and create the opportunity to secure larger commercial contracts. This is true for both large and small firms, with ISO certifications and practices being applicable to all organisations.
The key benefits of ISO certification includes:
- Increased revenue: leveraging the reputation of ISO certification can help you to win more tenders and contracts, whilst increasing efficiency aids customers satisfaction and retention.
- Improvement of your credibility: when organisations are looking for new suppliers, it is often a requirement to have a management system based on ISO, particularly for those in the public sector.
- Improved customer satisfaction: by understanding your customers’ needs and reducing errors you increase customer confidence in your ability to deliver products and services.
- Higher operating efficiency: by following industry best-practice and focusing on quality, safety and environment you can reduce costs.
- Improved decision-making: you can detect and identify problems in good time, which means that you can quickly take steps to avoid the same mistakes in the future
- Greater employee engagement: by improving internal communications you ensure everyone works to one agenda. Involving employees in designing process improvements makes them happier and more productive.
- Better process integration: by examining process interactions you can find improvements in efficiency more easily, thereby reducing errors and benefiting from cost savings.
- A continual improvement culture: this is the key principle of ISO management systems. It means that you embed a systematic approach to identifying and exploiting opportunities to improve.
- Better supplier relationships: using best-practice processes contributes to more efficient supply chains, and certification will signpost these to your suppliers.
How can Compliance Lab help?
If you have not explored ISO certification, we recommend talking to a compliance expert to ensure your business is ready for certification. At Compliance Lab, we have an experienced team of professionals who can talk you through the certification process and complete an in-depth assessment of your business to ensure you are compliant – or highlight any areas needing improvement.
Please contact us via email at 📩 info@compliancelab.com.au or call us on 📞1300 108 487. Our aim is to make businesses feel confident and completely in control, giving them a competitive edge to secure future tenders.
Please click on the link for our contact details https://compliancelab.com.au/contact/
