Quality Policy as an Integral Part of Company Culture
by Riku Niemelä, CEO of GrainSense
Just like GrainSense’s solutions provide our customers the tools for best quality they can create, we at GrainSense aim to create as high quality as possible in all aspects of our operations. We commit to consistently provide products and services that meet or exceed the requirements and expectations of our customers. GrainSense was issued the ISO 9001:2015 certificate in November 2021 by Kiwa for our quality management system.
The work towards quality certification has been an essential part of GrainSense’s organizational culture. The quality management system establishes a systematic and consistent way of acting in our business and everyday work. Having the quality management system in place means that our processes are established and in order, and they are regularly measured. Continuous improvement of operations is at the center of the whole culture of quality.
With the established processes and decision-making procedures, everyone in our team knows how things are handled, consequently the company's operations here in the organization are transparent. Planning and preparatory work has increased while ad hoc decisions have decreased, which is noticeable in our day-to-day work. The evidence-based decision making, which is one of the quality management principles in the ISO 9001, requires certain things being prepared and completed before decisions are made. Measuring, monitoring, documenting, analyzing and evaluating are in the core of our quality policies, e.g. in the form internal audits.
The requirement for a quality management system is often common with the whole supply chain, and this is also the case with GrainSense. It’s important to our partners and customers that we have this quality policy in place, and we also require it from all our essential partners, e.g. from the manufacturer of our products. It tells us that they have their processes in order and the way of working is one that corresponds to us and our values.
In addition to the quality management system, we have also composed our ESG strategy for the environmental, social and governmental aspects of sustainability. It supports our business objectives and development, e.g. the recyclability of our products. We wanted to write down our goals for these topics so that we can effectively work as a team to achieve our goals. Similar to documentation and established procedures with the ISO 9001, the ESG strategy helps us to work as a team towards our common goal.
Our high quality standards and sustainability goals include constant improvement of the products’ lifetime and bringing higher value to growing grain quality monitoring demands in the food chain. Our team’s mission is to contribute to overall grain supply chain sustainability in many ways – also from the upstream perspective and to enable more sustainable food production that our solutions support.
Personally, I’m a firm believer in the ISO 9001 standard and quality in general. Therefore, it hasn't been a question for me at all if we should have this certification or not. I see the investment worth all the work put towards it – the returns are much higher than the investment itself. With experience from previous quality projects in my career, this felt very natural and straight-forward in GrainSense’s path to achieving customer satisfaction by the use of quality procedures which will be operated to meet or exceed the requirements of ISO 9001.
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