Over the past year, we’ve been working behind the scenes at JK Pallets to overhaul every aspect of our business. We want our work culture and practices to mean we always create a product that’s reliable, durable and high performing, with the highest levels of customer satisfaction. This is how we’re going about it.

THE BIG PICTURE

We were already proud of our product and our people, but we’re not complacent. We want our customers to trust our product every time and to know that they’re getting an excellent deal. We want our customers to know that we’re looking for new ways to support their business, and are actively listening to them and responding to what they need. This is why we decided to work towards ISO 9001 to help us raise our game.

Working towards ISO 9001 has helped us think strategically about our ambitions for JK Pallets. We want to get even better at delivering a consistently excellent product for our customers in a great working environment for our staff. This isn’t a tick-box exercise: we’ve used the quality management principles that underpin ISO 9001 – customer focus, leadership, engagement of people, process approach, improvement, evidence-based decision making, and relationship management – to help us re-examine every element of our business. 

SMALL TWEAKS, BIG WINS

Elite coaches help athletes bring home medals by looking for ‘incremental gains’ – tiny improvements – like handwashing to prevent colds from cutting into training time – that add up to winning performance. Our ‘incremental gains’ will look different, but we’ve used ISO 9001 to help us comb through our practices to look for places – big and small – where we can innovate and improve. 

• We’ve looked at every element of our processes and found places to streamline, standardise or do things in new ways.
• We’ve created working instructions for every single operational process, and trained our people to meet that standard consistently, every time. 
• We know that one defective pallet can disrupt a supply chain, so we’ve looked at where things could go wrong and built in quality checks to mitigate.
• We’ve improved our back-office function, moving away from paper to electronic filing, so that we can provide a seamless, smooth service to our customers. 

It’s in the detail

We hold each other to the highest standards, not just in terms of what we produce, but in how we produce it. If you’ve seen The Bear – the story of a Chicago sandwich bar, its ambitious chef and the ‘family’ that work there – you’ll have seen how the kitchen is transformed from chaos to a serene, efficient order. Everything has its place, and everyone knows where to find it. We believe that an ordered working environment helps us to work together more effectively, as well as being more productive and efficient. So we’ve set a new expectation – every work area throughout the premises is neat and organized – and it’s already driving up standards.

Continuous improvement 

We want to reward the skill and expertise in our business, and as part of developing this talent, we ask everyone to regularly reflect on their own performance. Everyone is encouraged to feed back on what we’re doing well and what we could do better.

We’re already excited by the changes that working towards ISO 9001 has brought about, but please let us know where you think we can improve things further.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Once we’ve achieved ISO 9001 we’ll start working for our next milestone, ISO 14001 Environmental Management Systems. We’ll share what we learn along the way!