Window and door sector fastener specialist Rapierstar has invested in delivering further enhanced customer service and product quality by stepping up to the latest edition of the globally recognised management standard, ISO 9001.
The company, which is the largest supplier of high quality fasteners to the UK and Irish fenestration sectors, is now ISO 9001: 2015 certified, the latest incarnation of the standard awarded to the world’s best run businesses.
Achieving the latest standard requires a comprehensive assessment of how a business is set up and operates, moving on from the 2008 version’s focus just on quality and resource management to cover the context of the organisation, and its leadership, planning, performance evaluation and improvement mechanisms.
David Furness, MD of Rapierstar says: “Professionalism is so important as window and door fabricators seek total transparency, quality consistency and service reliability in their supply chain, and ISO 9001: 2015 is the globally accepted standard to demonstrate excellence across all these areas. The road to certification requires close independent scrutiny of everything we do as a business and it’s a rigorous process that shouldn’t be underestimated, so we’re really pleased to have made the transition from the previous 2008 version to the current standard.
“Ultimately being ISO 9001: 2015 certified helps us maximise the efficiency of what we do and ensure we are delivering excellent customer service. As our on-time-in-full delivery rate of 99.5% testifies, we are doing very well operationally, but we are constantly reviewing and improving as a business to keep ahead of the curve in an ever changing global market – and ISO 9001 is at the core.”
Rapierstar holds a stock of more than one billion fasteners at its 100,000 sq. ft. Cheshire bonded warehouse and distribution centre near Macclesfield, which ensures fabricators and installers across the UK and Ireland can benefit from access to a complete product range, competitively priced and delivered next day. This service is backed by industry-leading technical support which helps customers select the right fasteners for a specific application, with the Rapierstar team having a collective experience in the fastener market of more than 150 years, and further support provided by their in-house R&D and technical centre.
