by Brianna Crandall — June 29, 2011—Recognizing the important competitive benefits that effective collaboration can offer, EMCOR Group (U.K.), Lockheed Martin, NATS, and Raytheon U.K. have become the first businesses in the U.K. to be certified by the British Standards Institution (BSI) as meeting the requirements of the new BS 11000 standard for collaborative working.
The key concept behind BS 11000 is that organizations that work together can achieve much more than they can achieve alone. Key business benefits cited by the newly certified organizations include the positive influence the collaborative effort has on achieving and sustaining growth; enhanced success when responding to bidding opportunities; easier optimization of customer service; and ability to use the standard as the basis for building a whole spectrum of measurable supplier and customer relationships.
Speaking on behalf of EMCOR Facilities Services, Managing Director Nick Morris commented, “It has long been recognized within EMCOR that sustaining long-term relationships with key customers is vital for the success of our business as well as our client’s future growth aspirations. We were delighted to be the first organization in the facilities management sector to be awarded certification to the new British Standard.”
“EMCOR is different,” Morris continued, “not only in the services that we deliver, but in the way that we work and integrate with our customers. Ultimately we envisage that the whole spectrum of our relationships, from the preferred and valued members of our supply chain, through to our key customers, will be measured against this new and important business standard.”
BS 11000 supersedes the older publicly available standard, PAS 11000, and all four of the newly certified organizations have made the transition from the former standard, notes BSI. The new standard places greater emphasis on continual review than its predecessor, and is more closely aligned with other management system standards. It adopts an eight-stage approach designed to allow organizations of any size and in any sector to apply best practice principles to their own ways of working.
