Case Studies

BRISTOL BABCOCK IMPLEMENTS TELARC Q-BASE AND CREATES SOUND WORK STRUCTURE

Bristol Babcock Controls (NZ) Ltd plans to export its measuring instruments, and Manager Colin Dale believes the company’s management system will help their export drive.

A recognised certification is a form of assurance to potential overseas clients that you operate a sound and efficient business, says Mr Dale. We are receiving increasing overseas enquiries about our products, especially from the USA, China and South America. And I’m confident the decision to implement Telarc Q-Base, the quality management system for small to medium enterprises, will strengthen our ability to develop good export markets.

On the home front, Mr Dale says there is plenty of competition in the design and manufacture of measuring instruments. More than a few of Bristol Babcock’s major clients in New Zealand have quality management certification and expect similar standards from their suppliers. Local bodies, for example, tend to have stringent quality requirements of their suppliers.

Our clients with registered management systems are the main reason why we decided to implement Telarc Q-Base, says Mr Dale. We had done quite a bit of work towards achieving ISO 9000. But its scope was too large for a company of our small size. Enterprising Manukau was advertising a course in Q-Base, I went along and found it to be the practical answer. It has crystallised our operating systems and created a good work structure for our business. And it wasn’t too time consuming to implement because we had already done a great deal of the work towards an efficient management system.

Bristol Babcock is an agent for imported equipment as well as designers and manufacturers of process control systems for the local market and overseas market. The equipment is used to measure such things as temperature, pressure, flow levels and chemical composition. The company works with a wide variety of industries including oil and gas, breweries, forestry and food.

With a brewery, for example, we recommend the appropriate equipment, install it and get it working smoothly for the client. It’s a precise business in many respects because it’s all about quality control, says Mr Dale. The measuring device helps to maintain the desired quality levels. For example, we recently designed and made a measuring instrument for a dairy company so it could accurately measure moisture content in milk fat. Even a difference of one decimal point of a percent of moisture can take the product outside of the necessary specification. Previous methods of measuring the right moisture content had proved difficult. Now the factory has a reliable means of gauging a hard to measure product component like moisture content.