Barton Plant is a Midlands-based earthmoving, ground engineering and restoration contractor. Established in 1939, the company has developed from originally providing contract ploughing, to now being considered one of the region’s leading civils contractors.

Operating in a highly competitive environment, Barton recognised that to continue to grow they needed to be able to successfully tender for more business, and having ISO accredited systems and processes in place would help to achieve this.

Jeysen Mootien, Barton’s Director of Operations, explains: “The ISO standards are a recognised accreditation and we knew that to even start to have conversations with larger companies, we needed to be able to demonstrate that we operate in a professional and efficient manner – ISO is the only way we can do that.”

Laying the foundations for accreditation

To help them achieve the ISO standards, the Barton team enlisted support from Peter Jones and David Dennis from Independent Advice for Business.

“We started our ISO journey in July 2016 and I am really pleased we did not attempt to undertake it by ourselves,” says Jeysen. “We thought that it would take up a significant amount of time, but were quietly surprised by how stress-free the process was – and I am not someone who would normally say something like that!

“We had a clear vision of what we wanted to achieve. To do that, Peter and David became part of the team, working with our administration manager and engaging with service managers to adjust our systems and processes in a way that neither disrupted the workforce, nor their managers. Through this approach, any changes we needed to make felt subtle.

“Simple things, such as team members adopting a company form for use on site, rather than using their own ‘specially produced’ form, were adopted without resistance as they had been engaged and informed of its implementation. We now have a clear company way of doing things, which is bought into and accepted by all.”

“We have streamlined all our processes, so the Barton team now has access to, and can input into, the system wherever they are in the country – ensuring no time-delay in updating information – which means, as a manager, I can keep abreast of progress at all times.”

As a result, Barton sailed through their accreditation audit and achieved ISO9001.

“I was quite worried about the audit. Obviously, audits are about demonstrating you do what you have said you do, and as we had only just implemented the approach we were nervous about the outcome – I couldn’t quite believe that we achieved it so painlessly. This spurred us on to go for ISO14001 for our environmental management systems and BS OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health and Safety, which we also achieved.”

Building on accreditation success

Since achieving the three ISO standards, Barton has seen its workload increase by between 30 to 40 per cent.

“By having the standards, we are definitely being viewed differently and are being given the chance to tender for work that we may not have had the opportunity to do previously. The outcome is we secured one of the biggest contracts the company has carried out to date – an £8million project for Gazeley in Milton Keynes. We have also increased our success rate with tenders – historically we were being awarded about one in seven contracts, but that has increased now to one in five.

“The reason for that, I feel, is because we are now spending far less time answering the pre-qualification questionnaires. Rather than providing long explanations to quality questions, we are able to simply tick the boxes that ask “do you have ISO9001, ISO14001 and OHSAS 18001 – if so proceed to the next section” – this saves us a significant amount of time and means we can really focus on the pre-construction approach and our pricing,” adds Jeysen.

The rewards have not just been realised through an increase in work, Jeysen has found he has been given an invaluable gift:

“Having the standards across the organisation means we are far more efficient day-to-day. I no longer have to spend time trying to find the information I need for a project or for a tender, and now find I have far much more time to concentrate on the operations of the company, and can focus on the people and how we implement the continuous improvements that are identified through our ISO systems.

“There are a lot of things you can put a value on, such as the potential cost saving of not having to employ a quality manager to oversee your improvements, or the new contracts we have secured, but actually having the time to focus on doing your job really well rather than doing the paperwork, is priceless, and that is across the company.

“As a management team, we now know, in real time, exactly how we are doing as a company – what we are doing well and what needs adjusting – and we can be honest with ourselves and transparent internally and externally about how we work.

Next steps

Now that Barton have achieved the ISO accreditations, they are keen to hold onto them and have even increased the frequency of their audit from annually to bi-annually to ensure they continue to reap the rewards they have since experienced.

“Everything is working as it should, and we want that to continue,” says Jeysen. “We have a programme of improvement in place, which is reviewed monthly at management meetings. We are currently benchmarking our environmental performance to develop our improvement plan, but have already started to change our lighting to LEDs and are putting in place hybrid cars and plant.

“We certainly feel we are now able to be more responsive to any legislative or market changes, in addition to making our own identified improvements. The benefits of which are realised by our clients. The civils world is not only competitive, but the work is dangerous – clients need to know that they are employing someone who is not only able to do the job, and can do it efficiently, but in a healthy and safe way, without any issues– which is exactly what we do.

“The future looks bright for us I would say. We have a good pipeline in place and feel we are starting to carve a niche for ourselves in the market – fulfilling the contracts that are too small for the big companies and too big for the small companies, we are really excited now as to what the future holds.”

 

Find out more about Barton Plant at: www.barton.co.uk