To our great surprise, we found out, according to our ISO consultant, that the majority of ISO compliant working procedures and standardization were already in place at Exabytes.
However, we had not had the proper documentation to indicate our work flow, which was also of paramount importance to give Exabytes new employees a standard guide during training. In other words, our staff training was done orally with hands-on experience and practical guidance, still lacking a comprehensive written manual of working procedures that allows new staff to refer and read to understand more both during and after training.
From there, efforts to document all our standard working procedures kick-started.
Department managers drew out the process of each working procedure using flowcharts, described them in professional terms and filled out numerous forms after having regular meet-ups with team members and cross department meetings with managers.
The required forms and documentations included:
- Approve Supplier List
- Supplier Performance Evaluation Form
- Corrective Action Request Form
- NCP Database
- Observation List
- Audit Check List
- Audit Plan
- Customer Satisfaction Survey
- Payment Received and Credit Handling
- Domain Name Guideline
- Refund Processing
- Fraud Handling
- Management Review Meeting Minute Template
- etc
At the end of July, 2011, as all documentation of various departments were completed in time, we invited our ISO consultant to come once again to perform an internal audit in order to make sure everything was properly and correctly documented. Subsequently, some changes on documents were made and in early August, we were 100% already ready for the big day – the upcoming official audit by ISO.
August was the much anticipated month by Exabees! BM Trada, the ISO body in Malaysia came to perform the official audit.
Numerous interviews with various department managers were conducted by the persons from BM Trada, to investigate whether all facets of Exabytes and its working procedures were in compliance with the requirements of ISO.
The month of November was the month of celebration, as Exabytes was finally awarded ISO 9001:2008 Web Hosting Provisioning!! Once again, thank you to our ISO consultant and kudos to all Exabees for all the sweat and hard work everyone has put in for the past 10 years in making this a reality!
To you our blog readers who intend to get your own companies ISO certified as well, don’t hesitate. The process might be a little time consuming and bitter sweet, but eventually, it was definitely worth the effort!
