Made For Trade has gained ISO9001:2015 accreditation for quality control.

Refining the business to gain the accreditation has been the result of years of work for MFT, and particularly so in the last 24 months under quality manager, Jason Couse, who joined Made For Trade from a parallel role in engineering at the start of 2020.

The procedures needed to satisfy the accreditation process apply to every single area of the business. These start with the MFT sales team and the adoption of consistent processes for dealing with new enquiries, right through to packaging and product leaving the factory.

Chris Wann, operations director at Made For Trade, said: “Understanding the importance of control in a larger business was paramount as MFT continues to expand. We recognised that a robust system which can provide validated data from all areas is necessary for our own feedback – and to make the informed decisions required for success. This is where the need for a documented and audited quality system came in.

“We brought in Jason Couse as our quality manager, who was tasked with supporting other members of the senior management team to document all business processes. It has been a challenging two years to get to this point but we are delighted that with Jason’s hard work and guidance the team has successfully achieved an ISO9001 certificate for Made For Trade.

“What is of key significance is that we now have a rigorous quality system in place that is tailored specifically to the business.”

Jason Couse commented: “Having joined Made For Trade at the start of 2020, the rapidly expanding business already had a very good base to build on; the directors’ engineering background already helping create processes that were ready to be refined and formalised.

“My part was to build on what was already in place to provide a practical and workable Quality Management System (QMS) for improving, monitoring and continually improving all areas of the company, but also with one eye on meeting the requirements of ISO9001:2015.

“The first step was raising awareness of the standard across all members of the staff team and what it means for the organisation, before working with each department in turn to help create processes, develop training needs and identify risk and opportunities.”