As bid directors, bid managers and bid writers, we know how important the delivery of high-quality services is to our clients
Our day-to-day work is dedicated to producing compelling bids for our clients that showcase these services. This almost always includes writing about the benefits of ISO certifications on our clients’ processes and procedures and the positive impact they have on service delivery.
We are therefore delighted to announce that following an audit by certification body DNV in December 2023, we have been accredited to ISO9001, 14001 and 45001 for quality, environmental and health and safety management systems. The work involved in achieving this was led by our Work Winning Director Richard Roddie with support from the EiB team, including Caroline Mott, Christina Pimenta and Sarah Gibson. They worked together diligently to put the processes and procedures in place and generate the evidence required to satisfy the DNV auditor that we were fully compliant with all three standards.
As with our own clients, attaining these certifications demonstrates the quality of the work winning and bid management services, graphic design and market research services we offer!
Quality throughout the business – ensuring our clients receive a first-class service
We sought ISO9001 certification (the globally recognised ISO standard for quality management systems) to demonstrate our commitment to quality. It demonstrates to our clients that we have effective quality assurance processes in place which will help them to produce winning tenders. To ensure these processes are effective, we have created a new quality manager role, appointing Senior Bid Manager Sarah Gibson to lead on quality, reporting to Richard Roddie, our work winning Director. Sarah supports our bid teams, reviewing each client project following the bid submission, monitoring outputs and trends and identifying continual improvement opportunities to the bid management services we offer.
Key to our quality processes is our EiB Toolkit
This provides our team with clear, end-to-end guidance and best practice on producing exceptional tender submissions for clients. It also ensures each service we deliver to our clients is of a consistently high standard. Keeping abreast of industry best practice enables us to continually improve the toolkit, supporting our team with the most up-to-date guidance.
Protecting the environment and helping our clients develop exceptional sustainability solutions
We sought ISO14001 certification (the globally recognised ISO standard for environmental management systems) for three key reasons:
- to play our part in helping the UK achieve net zero by 2050
- to reduce waste through sustainable practices (e.g., minimising use of paper, avoiding single-use plastics)
- given the focus on net zero carbon emissions, to help our clients develop exceptional sustainability responses within their tenders.
As part of our commitment to sustainability and to reduce carbon, we encourage team members to complete carbon literacy training, which is certified by the Carbon Literacy Project. The training is proving to be extremely valuable in helping us to meet the commitments outlined above. We have delivered several awareness sessions to our team and we have used the outcomes of a carbon footprint calculator to analyse trends and provide suggestions for how we can continually reduce our carbon footprint.
A safe, healthy and happy workforce
We sought ISO45001 certification (the globally recognised ISO standard for managing occupational health and safety (OHS)) to demonstrate our commitment to keeping our staff safe, healthy and happy. We regularly run health and safety training sessions to keep staff aware of OHS risks, encourage them to keep fit through initiatives such as our 2022 walking challenge and promote physical and mental health awareness days/weeks.
We also help ensure that any of our people who are working alone in the office are kept safe through Solo Protect ID. This lightweight, user-friendly lone worker device can monitor a person’s health and can be used by staff to seek immediate help in an emergency.
Staff health, safety and wellbeing is our priority and ensures we can build and maintain a high performing team, so we continuously look for ways to improve.