ISO 9001 can improve your business profitability

We have recently been going through the process of achieving ISO 9000 accreditation for our Software as a Service EDI/EIPP offering. It has been a fascinating process. I had always believed that one of the secrets of a successful outsourcing or SaaS offering is to reduce the number of support calls to a minimum. I know this is a statement of the blindingly obvious but you would be amazed the tales we hear from customers moving to our service from other offerings.

When we started out on the route to ISO 9001 accreditation I thought it would have some benefit in terms of seeing where we were making mistakes, correcting them and of course there is the marketing benefit, but mainly in making sure that we continued to provide a quality service for our customers. I believe we are the only SaaS EDI or EIPP provider to be accredited for ISO 9001.

But the more I, with the help of our ISO 9001 consultant, got in to the depths of understanding ISO 9001 it became clear that whilst ISO 9001 does highlight the quality of whatever systems are being measured, the major benefit is the application of the continuous improvement principle.

We have been accredited for our data mapping processes and our systems and support processes for the provision of EDI data mapping, translation and transportation. In my next blog I will discuss the application of process to data mapping and translation, but today I want to concentrate on support.

When I look at a lot of our competitors, especially in the SaaS EDI or EIPP space, I notice that whilst the are bigger than us in terms of turnover, they are typically making huge losses. Some have accumulated losses of over 26 million and yet they still have turnover that is substantially less than their costs.

Looking at it even closer you can see that whilst they increase turnover they are increasing staff, and staff costs, much faster. To me this leads to the conclusion that whatever systems and support they have are not efficient enough. And that is one of the major benefits of the ISO9001 process.

What we have found is that every time we have have a support call/system issue the ISO process of continuous improvement has helped us to eradicate that error/issue for the future. It does not mean that we never get errors but analysis shows use that over 85% of all support calls/issue we received are outside of our service. They are either errors with the data sent to us or the comms of the sender or the recipient.

By concentrating on the ISO 9001 continuous improvement process we are able to keep our support costs to a minimum, we are able to handle millions of transactions per annum with a much smaller team than any of our competitors and we are able to keep improving the experience for our customers and their trading partners.

ISO 9001 does not make you infallible, but it helps you to learn from each mistake and improve your business and profitability.

I did have a cheeky thought though, should I go to the bigger players making all the losses and offer that we do the product, service and support for them, there will of course be an element of cost for them ;-). We could then show them how to make money instead of burning it. Just a thought....