Grove Worldwide’s Shady Grove, PA, manufacturing and service complex has been certified to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001:2000 Standard.
In 1994, Grove became the first crane manufacturer to be certified to the ISO 9001:1994 Standard and is now one of the first to be qualified under the new, more comprehensive standard.
Grove has been working for the past year and a half under the direction of the auditing registrar British Standards Institute (BSI) to gain acceptance to this international quality standard.
“The effort and commitment by all of our people to gain acceptance for this prestigious registration is another indication of our continuing focus on the customer. Our product offerings, our quality emphasis, our entire design and build process is customer driven and the fact that we are among the first crane manufacturers to qualify, speaks for itself,” said Kevin Haurin, Grove’s director of Total Quality.
The previous ISO 9001 standard was focused primarily on the manufacturing process. The new 2000 standard is more comprehensive and now the ISO Quality Management System controls the entire business management system. It covers business process relationships that extend through to the customer and has integrated elements of both the U.S. and European Quality awards.
The business process elements of Grove’s registration are wide-ranging and include order management, finance, human resources, product development, service, and new market development.
The new standard recognizes that the entire business process management system, not just manufacturing’s quality management system, is essential to the quality of the product.
It also acknowledges the importance of the people in the organization and that everyone is responsible for quality, hence the focus on the people, training, work environment and human resources. The standard also places a focus on how customer information is fed into the organization as well as measurement, analysis and improvement methods to complete the customer/manufacturer loop in a continuous fashion.
