Links Group and BBG seminar explores how to improve business through standards

Dubai, UAE, 24 April 2017: Businesses looking to unlock significant growth potential within their organisations should consider implementing international standards. That was the view of panelists at a recent seminar in Dubai on how to improve business through standards.

Organised by Links Group, one of the UAE’s leading providers of commercial facilitation and advisory services, and the British Business Group Dubai & Northern Emirates, the seminar brought together the British Standards Institution (BSI) with public and private sector ogranisations to understand how achieving the ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management System certificate has benefited their businesses.

The panel was moderated by Mr. Alistair Long, Deputy Consul General for the British Embassy in Dubai and represented by Mohamed Sabet Chamie, Business Development Manager for BSI; Dr. Ahmed Al-Adawy, Quality Expert and Patient Safety, Dubai Health Authority; and Wayne Merrick, General Manager, Links Group.

BSI is the world’s first National Standards Body and a founding member of the International Organization for Standardization. Its flagship ISO 9001 standard for quality management systems helps organisations demonstrate to their customers that their products and services are of consistently high quality, and comply with applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.  The 2015 edition of the standard also recognises an organisation’s commitment to enhancing customer satisfaction, identifying and addressing risks within the business and achieving continuous improvement through the application of its quality management system. 
 
According to Chamie, more than 60% of BSI clients reported higher customer satisfaction levels because of implementing the ISO 9001 Standard. While ISO 9001 remains the most popular standard adopted by UAE-based businesses, Chamie says BSI is seeing an increase in the adoption of many other standards, likely a result of the UAE Government’s focus on engendering excellence.

This was certainly the case for Dubai Health Authority. “The Dubai Excellency Programme provided a strong foundation for future shaping Dubai Health Authority and driving innovation throughout the whole organisation,” said Dr. Al-Adawy

“Healthcare is one of the most complex organizational structures. Within Dubai Health Authority we have 25 health units and 13,000 employees and there was much debate over the relevance of ISO when we already have certain healthcare standards to which we must comply. 

“Healthcare is a process driven organisation, but is not necessarily standardized in our horizontal thinking. ISO 9001 is forcing an important cultural change within Dubai Health Authority – moving away from who does what in their vertical silos to what is done by whom. We are in an early stage of our standards journey but are already seeing that the gaps, frustrations and redundancies are much less.”

For Links Group, adoption of ISO 9001 has—in just six months—improved the company’s service level speed and efficiency, which has translated into a better customer experience.

“We are an SME with 40 staff in the UAE and 400 clients so we needed to formalize our processes to drive efficiencies throughout the company and improve productivity. We also realized that as a professional services company we had become too reliant on individuals for certain processes. ISO 9001:2015 has de-risked this issue by capturing that knowledge in official company procedure and protects us from any turnover of key staff,” explained Merrick. 

While all panelists agreed the immediate impact of adopting international standards has been improved internal and customer satisfaction, in Links Group’s experience ISO 9001 has also become a competitive advantage.

John Martin St.Valery, founder & CEO of Links Group explains: “ISO 9001 is more than a badge of honour for us. We deal with a lot of multinational and large cap companies so it gives them great confidence to know that our systems are robust and in line with international expectations. We pioneered the corporate nominee structure for company incorporation back in 2002 and since then a lot more players have adopted this model. Compliance with international standards helps us to differentiate our services and drives our culture of continuous improvement. 

“But most significant is the role international standards played in our recent acquisition by Equiom Group. Standardized processes demonstrated to Equiom Group that we had an efficient and scalable professional services company that was able to deliver consistently against high quality standards.”