ISO 9001 Customer Description
Company Fedro is a well-known supplier and service-renderer in the field of asphalt emulsions and road-construction works. It has been in the market for 15 years and is considered the leader in the business. The company hires about 150 employees, most of which are seasonal physical workers. Administration's employees are about 10 persons along with the agent. Due to the changing investors' requirements (mainly public administration) towards the contractors, in year 2001 the company decided to implement a quality management system according to the ISO PN-EN 9001-2000 standard.  

Description of the issue
After the positive certification audit the company has decided to supervise and improve the Quality management system on its own. For this purpose the person previously designated by the board has undergone appropriate trainings and has been given proper rights by the board. The responsibilities, that the agent has taken upon himself, seemed not to interfere with his current activities in the company, meaning preparing offers. A year has passed and the company was preparing itself to the supervising audit set for May 2002. According to the adopted procedure, we have informed the agent about the upcoming audit. But as it turned out that given person had been transferred to a different department, as it had been decided that there are more important matters in the company that the Quality System. However, the Board wanted to maintain the quality system, although it did not want to extend the employment structure. It was also decided that internal audits conducted by the agent (a person from within the company) had not been worth it, and they wanted the system to be an actually effective organization management tool and contribute to its development.

TQM Consulting approach
Based on the conversations conducted with the Board, we have proposed quality outsourcing, which will be based on quarterly visits of our consultant and supervision of system documentation as well as making the necessary changes. Measuring the indexes, which had previously been only a record in the quality book, became a very important element. The proposed approach was adopted with complete support of the board and considered the most optimum for their organization. Currently, the system is conducted reliably and effectively, external consultations encourage to work and show the elements, which are not seen while being within the company.
Currently, most small and medium companies contract this form of cooperation with TQM Consulting.

Benefits
As the result of external activities the following items have been acquired (quality outsourcing):

• Cost-effectiveness, visits of the consultant once every quarter cost less than an employee hired on a permanently basis;
• System-effectiveness, ambivalence of the internal consultant, who is not involved in the internal arrangements within the company (the internal audit is more reliable);
• Work-effectiveness, regular measurement of processes' indexes allow the company to effectively manage and, at the right moment, react to any unfavorable changes (preventive action);

Effective rewarding based on work-effectiveness and not the amount of worked hours;