Sendrig Construction is family run construction company founded in 1981 by the late Mr. Kevin Lee. Operating in and around the North East of the UK, Sendrig works with a variety of customer such as universities and government. As well as their construction services, in the last five years Sendrig has expanded and extended in to landscaping and gritting services. They have now grown in to a leading property maintenance company; their highly professional team is experienced in providing an expert service to a wide variety of clients including housing associations, local authorities and other commercial clients.
Sendrig has always performed well due to Mr. Kevin Lee’s longstanding involvement within the industry and developing good contacts in the region. Mr. Graeme Lee, Managing Director, explains why ISO certification became the next logical step for Sendrig, “by 2007 it was becoming more apparent that customers wanted a formalisation of their suppliers systems and some sort of certification, the ISO accreditation kept coming up. It became increasingly difficult to reach the latter stages of tenders unless you had an ISO accredited quality system in place.” Once Sendrig had met with their local IMSM consultant, they realised that they were already doing a lot of what was required by the standard. But they did not have the formal recognition which was causing them problems in terms of procurement of work.
The ISO standard bought in many benefits for Sendrig, such as expansion in to new markets such as the NHS who has a need for very high standards when it comes to taking on contractors. This has lead in to work in other areas of the NHS network, showing that this ISO really has gone a long way. Mr. Lee comments, “they are assured that your systems are in place, you are set up correctly and that they won’t have to chase you around once you start a job for them.”
In terms of putting the ISO system in place and starting to use it, Sendrig found implementation very easy. “Our IMSM Assessor was excellent, they were extremely helpful. If we had any teething problems using the system, they came out to our offices and went through it all with us. In dealing with IMSM, they were always there if we needed them or had any problems, but to be honest we found the system set up so user friendly that we found it really easy to use.”
Because Sendrig had most of the systems in place, the impact of the ISO internally was not as great as the external impact. However, it explained Sendrig’s systems in a formalised way and so it assisted in the induction of new employees, by explaining how they work and what is expected.
“Externally, it comes down to the procurement of work, because that’s what it is all about for us, we’re always looking for more work. Winning contracts is such a large part of the company, like most construction companies, you never stop trying to bring in the work. ISO is also important because of the class of client that it attracts. It has opened up so many more work streams for Sendrig.
“Working with IMSM has been really easy, they have been very accommodating. You get plenty of choice with audit dates and times; they do not dictate which day they are coming. Our Assessor and everybody we have dealt with at IMSM have never given us any problems. We never felt that messages didn’t get passed on or anything like that.” Mr. Lee concludes, “They just provided a really good service!”
