Read about Actility's experience of ISO 9001 certification in this article.
Founded in 2010, Actility specializes in the deployment of long-range low-bandwidth networks for the Internet of Things (IoT). It is one of the creators of the LoRaWAN communication protocol, which uses off-license radio frequencies to connect objects to each other.
In2019, after coaching by Feel Agile, the company obtained ISO 9001 certification for its activities with no non-conformities.
On the eve of the follow-up audit marking the first year of the certification cycle, we caught up with Olivier Hersent, co-founder and CEO of the company. He explains his approach, what's at stake and how his company's organization has evolved in recent months.
We work in a sector that is extremely sensitive to quality. There's a famous English expression that says it all: "carrier class", the symbol of extreme quality. Our systems are deployed on a very large scale, and we work on national networks, which requires particular attention to quality. As far as ISO 9001 certification is concerned, this was originally a request from one of our customers.
Even though Actility is ten years old, I've been working with the team for over twenty years, and we were ISO 9001 certified before that. So we're very familiar with ISO 9001. We were all absolutely convinced of the value of ISO operation in the internal organization to ensure a good level of quality. And we were also convinced that we were sufficiently following the recommendations of the standard in spirit and in practice. So, for us, the motivation for such a certification process was obviously to satisfy the customer, but also to enhance the value of our products by obtaining official recognition of the level of quality.
One completely unexpected benefit of ISO 9001 was the quality of our intranet. At the time, we were 150 people strong. Communication issues arose: how does one department know what another department is doing? Especially as we operate in ten countries and have four sites in France alone. So we wanted to create an intranet, but we just couldn't manage it. It was of poor quality, or people didn't participate...
When we began the certification process, we entrusted the ISO 9001 project to a member of staff with an IT background. She wanted the project to become completely online, so she used the intranet. Each department began to put its processes, records and illustrations on the intranet. And within three months, we had an intranet that was extremely well structured according to the company's process composition, illustrated, up to date and with employees who really started to use it. Today, this is the greatest benefit we've derived from this ISO process.
With ISO 9001, we can not only improve the quality and organization of our structure, but also improve internal team communication with a much better structured, quality intranet. For me, it's almost become my reference methodology for setting up a company's internal communication system!
It took us around nine months to implement ISO 9001 and obtain certification. As regards the choice of support, even though we had a very strong ISO culture, it was still a culture that dated back ten years before...
We were not aware of the simplifications in the recent standards. It was also a question of providing an internal dynamic. We're a small company and our staff are already at 110%.
Psychologically, having to defer to an outsider, even if it's just having a meeting with an outsider, is quite different and engaging. It's the combination of a dedicated in-house person and the credibility and friendly pressure of an outsider that has helped our staff find the time to make progress on the ISO 9001 project.
Feel Agile was like a sparring partner with the person dedicated to the project internally. They helped us with documentary production. It was really important for us to have the capacity for fairly regular ongoing support. There were weekly updates. The fact that we had this permanent resource meant that we could support our teams in a flexible way.
I'd say it's pragmatic support. I think that in French culture, having an auditor come and look at your work makes people extremely nervous. You get people who suddenly don't feel involved, or don't feel like attending meetings. There's that "back to school" feeling that someone is grading you. I was quite surprised by the strength of this brake. Feel Agile was able to reassure our employees perfectly and make the audit exercise less dramatic.
In my previous company, we chose to include only the core business in the scope of certification. Our R&D teams have been used to working in this way for many years. The quality system works on its own. For this certification, we chose to include the entire company in the scope. Today, it's much harder to keep up to date other departments that have just been certified, because they're not as accustomed to maintaining processes as our R&D is.
In addition, during the year we decided to merge certain departments. So, to keep our quality management system up to date, we're reviewing processes, reassigning or changing them to suit the new context. And I've noticed that with the quality approach, our employees will spontaneously express themselves on any ambiguities that may exist.
In France, our culture doesn't encourage us to express ourselves and make comments on the organization of the company... we talk about it at the coffee shop between colleagues but not to managers, for fear that it might be frowned upon. With the excuse of quality, our employees express themselves much more. I've set up a tool within the company, an internal communication letter that responds to everything that has come up during the week. This letter enables me to communicate with all employees in real time. It's an effective tool. Quality has thus become a key player in all our internal communication processes.
Actility is a world leader in ultra-low-power industrial radio networks (LoRaWAN) for the Internet of Things. More than 50 public network operators and thousands of enterprises worldwide rely on the "ThingPark" platform. Actility also supplies patented ultra-low-power geolocation technologies through its subsidiary Abeeway(www.abeeway.com). The ThingPark platform, which is ISO 9001 certified and benefits from over 7 years' experience in all regions of the world, is at the heart of numerous innovations that are advancing agriculture or livestock farming, improving productivity and safety in many industries, and thus contributing to sustainable development. ThingPark Market(http://market.thingpark.com ) offers a wide choice of gateways, sensors and IoT solutions.
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