{"id":31396,"date":"2017-03-16T10:25:54","date_gmt":"2017-03-16T10:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.minerva-calibration.com\/how-customer-demands-changed-minervas-quality-standards\/"},"modified":"2017-09-18T12:46:20","modified_gmt":"2017-09-18T12:46:20","slug":"how-customer-demands-changed-minervas-quality-standards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.minerva-calibration.com\/de\/minerva\/how-customer-demands-changed-minervas-quality-standards\/","title":{"rendered":"How customer demands changed Minerva’s Quality Standards"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last 30 years we have developed a thorough quality system focused on responding to customer feedback.\u00a0Thanks to a clear workflow and weighting system we register, rank and act on complaints. This has led to an balanced quality system, anchoring our ISO accreditation and ensuring the continuous improvement of all our products and services since 1988. Carel Adolfse, Technical Director of Minerva, explains the origin and set up of this quality system and the preparation for the future ISO\/IEC 17025 standards.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Customers asking for traceability and measurement uncertainty<\/h2>\n

Already in 1987 our company Minerva was selling high end metrological equipment for more than 20 years. Our demanding customers started asking questions about the quality of measurements and performance assurance of supplied equipment. We anticipated on those questions by setting up a dedicated area where we compared customer devices against a Minerva reference standard.<\/p>\n

But customers became more and more aware of metrological concepts, like traceability and measurement uncertainty, and started to ask Minerva to take steps to assure the quality of these measurement comparisons.<\/p>\n

You can say that this was the driver for Minerva to take her first preventive action by initiating a project to obtain an accreditation by the predecessor of the RvA (Dutch Council for Accreditation).<\/p>\n

Carel Adolfse was asked by the Minerva management at that time to lead this project. Carel: „I was kind of skeptic about the benefits it could bring our company. With today’s knowledge I have to admit I was totally wrong and I can say that this was one of those decisions which changed the evolution of Minerva (and in such my life too).“<\/p>\n

The start of our ISO\/IEC 17025 quality system<\/h2>\n

\"\"„Back in the beginning of our quality system, the document standard we had to comply to was EN 45001 and ISO\/IEC 25. My experience from that time is that technical competence was more important than management and quality.<\/p>\n

This all changed in 1999 when the first edition of ISO\/IEC 17025 was published and our accreditation needed to comply against this standard.\u00a0Quality as a concept now was much more embedded in the standard and our way of thinking as a small company needed a major adjustment.<\/p>\n

In the 11 years of accredited experience and me growing older, I had a much better idea of what was needed and completely re-wrote our quality system according to the ISO structure. In contradiction of our initial system, now our quality system was designed with practical use in mind.<\/p>\n

One major improvement in our system was (and still is) continuous improvement driven by complaints, preventive and corrective actions.“<\/p>\n

Complaints: Our quality system implementation today<\/h2>\n

Having complaints looks like a contradiction to quality but it’s definitely not! The challenge for us, and I guess for all of you, is how we define of what we consider to be a complaint. It is probably true that when you do not receive complaints, your definition of complaints is wrong!\u00a0At Minerva we distinguish two different types of complaints:<\/p>\n