Case Studies

TONKIN & TAYLOR LTD

The Company

Tonkin & Taylor is a specialist, employee-owned environmental and engineering consultancy with offices throughout New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Fiji and the Philippines. The company’s client base includes major international and donor agencies, government departments, local government, commercial organisations, developers, contractors and other consultants.

T&T’s team of engineers, scientists, planners and project managers are actively involved the civil, environmental, geotechnical and water resources areas, both in New Zealand and overseas. Recent major projects include the Northern Gateway Alliance−Orewa to Puhoi motorway extension north of Auckland; the Mangakotukutuku Stream diversion project in the Waikato, and the Kate Valley landfill project in North Canterbury, all of which have won awards for environmental or engineering excellence.

The company’s business improvement facilitator, Steven Moss, explains why the T&T team sought ISO 9001 certification and outlines the benefits it has delivered.

ISO 9001

“ISO 9001 laboratory certification was first awarded T&T in 1975 and we have since had good reason to extend it into the quality management area. Key clients such as councils, Transit New Zealand and other government agencies require a standards approach to quality assurance as a condition of their contracts with us and ISO 9001 provides that assurance. Our laboratories also require ISO 9001 if they are to be marketed as certified laboratories. Geotechnics Ltd, for example, was the first company in the world to certified to ISO 9001.”

Why Telarc?

“Telarc has certified our laboratories to ISO 9000 standards for over 30 years and and it was logical that we asked it to extend that into the certification of our management, finance, quality and other internal systems. We are now involved in several preferred supplier programmes and Telarc is the preferred auditor for these, as it is in certifying us to ACC secondary level in the health and safety area. As a result of ISO 9001,T&T is able to assure its clients that it can be relied upon to deliver quality consultancy services today and in the future.”

The Benefits of Partnership

Implementation benefits

“Our Telarc auditor played a major role in helping the company to first identify what standard and level of competence we needed to achieve to protect our market, both in New Zealand and overseas. He then helped us to put appropriate management systems in place across the whole business. In the many changes and updates that have occurred since then, we have had Telarc with us all the way.

“The bottom line is that when we need to prove that we have the capabilities to deliver, we can rely on an independent auditing agency like Telarc to provide the service required in a consistent and internationally recognised way.”

Certification benefits

“ISO 9001 certification has:

• Given T&T a strong base on which to market its services to countries where performance and consistency in the delivery of engineering solutions are vital.
• Enabled T&T to retain preferred supplier status with its main clients.
• Helped T&T win a number of national awards for projects recently completed, including the NZ Contractors Federation supreme environmental award and the Association of Consulting Engineers gold award for excellence.

“In short, our clients want assurance that we can do the work, deliver on the promises we make and provide solutions to their problems at a cost they can afford and we can afford to deliver. In these terms, ISO 9001 is both a benefit and a solution.”

Why ISO 9001?

ISO 9001 is the most commonly used international certification standard. It provides a framework that enables businesses to develop and implement their own effective quality management systems for the manufacture and supply of virtually all products and services.

September 2008