The Quality Hub Podcast

Government Contracting and ISO Certification Part 2

Hello, everyone, and thanks for listening to the Quality Hub chatting with ISO experts. I’m your host, Xavier Francis. Today I’m here again with Rene Ferri. Customer Success Manager, and Kevin Metz, sales and business development manager here at CORE. Glad to have you again.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thank you. A pleasure to be here.

So glad you’re with us. Now, this week’s podcast is part two of ISO Certification and Government Contracting. Let’s continue our discussion with Renee and Kevin. And let’s start with Renee. So, Rene, what are some misconceptions or myths surrounding ISO standards and their role in government contracting that you’ve encountered?

You know, essentially, it’s not too much of a complicated structure. Based upon the fact that the government has put in minimum requirements for customers to be eligible. Doesn’t generate a lot of misconceptions or myths in and of itself. One of the most common misconceptions is that obtaining ISO certification is just to put a piece of paper on the wall.

Or in the contract.

Or. Exactly. Exactly. But those who enter the process with that in mind will be very surprised. ISO certification has built within its requirements that prevent that. So even though you’re going to obtain your certification, it’s not a once-and-done process. Every single year you’re going to have to be you’re going to have to go through an audit and perform processes such as management review, internal audit, corrective action process, and supplier evaluation processes to ensure that you’re continuing to follow the structure that you have put in place and then you’re not putting your certification in jeopardy.

Absolutely. I mean, it’s so true that it’s not a once-and-done for a piece of paper. And most of the time I know Suzanne Weber Smatko is a huge proponent of what ISO does for a company. You know, you gain you won’t grow. You’re not going to gain the true benefits for your business just from these standards for a piece of paper. They can help. Now, do you find if you’re not keeping your subscription, and your certification up to date, does that put you in danger of perhaps losing the contract you got?

Yes, absolutely. We get calls a lot about folks who have gone through the process once, have obtained their certification, and then lost it. They haven’t kept it up there. They didn’t pass their audit. And so, they lost their certification. We do a lot of education, as Kevin indicated, not only through his team that does a lot of education on the upfront but even, you know, on an ongoing basis to try to educate customers about what they should be doing to kind of keep that in place. But we help customers, no matter what their situation is.

So, we’ve helped quite a few customers that were in that situation, and they’ve bounced back, and we’ve gotten them to where they needed to be and then, you know, offered them some additional assistance that helps them to maintain it moving forward. We work with small businesses and there’s either a limited budget, but there’s limited resources and time. You know, I don’t believe that any of our customers are just sitting there saying, forget it, I don’t want to do this. It’s that they’ve run out of time and resources.

Yeah, business happens.

Exactly. And where they thought that they were going to have time to do the stuff they didn’t and caught up to them kind of too quickly.

One thing to emphasize there is that, you know, you ask the question, can they put you at risk of losing your contract? The government doesn’t play around. Right. You know, they are there immediately, once they get notified that you no longer have that certificate, they will boot you off the contract. So, you need to be smart about what you’re doing. And that’s why, you know, to Renee’s point, we’re very focused on building a system that works for our customers that should be with anything you’re doing for the government. You need to make sure it’s ingrained into who you are as a company and focus on making that your identity.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

I do have an example. I have a customer who hired a new chief technology officer who I had met at an event, and they were certified to all the standards. They were certified to nine CMMI, 27, and 20. And he had just he was just new to the organization. And they had all those things in place. And he reached out to me probably within weeks of meeting me to let me know that once he had gotten in and started to dig through. This goes back to what Kevin referenced earlier.

He discovered that the registrar that they had used was outside of the country and was not valid. And so, they were, and they live in that government contracting space. And so, they very quickly needed to get valid certifications for all those standards. Our teams work together very diligently and in as quick a period as possible, kind of moved them through that process to get everything set up in place. He knew that they were not going to be able to continue to participate in that government space in that situation.

Yeah, I can understand that. So, Kevin, how can smaller businesses or startups with limited resources pursue ISO certification to enhance their chances of getting a government contract?

Okay, so bear with me because this will sound like the wrong answer. So, spending money on, you know, consulting services and with companies like us is probably the most effective way for small businesses, startups, you know, companies with limited resources to go about it. And the reason for that is because, one, that’s what we do, right? That’s our focus. That’s our business. We live in this space, and we understand it.

But two, you know, you’re looking at it from the time saving and the money saving that you’re going to have because of what resources you’re going to have to allocate to doing it internally. For, you know, the time that you’re taking people away from their day-to-day jobs, what kind of money you’re losing from them, not focusing on their, you know, their tier A position requirements. So that’s why it might sound like the wrong answer but is a valid answer to that question.

You know, this isn’t a heavy, heavy lift, but it’s a lift. And if you don’t have the people in place to do it is one thing. But if you don’t have anybody that understands how to do it is another. These things are very kind of nebulous. What’s it telling me to do? We’re sort of like there to translate that and say, this is what it means, and this is what auditors look for. And this was what it meant in your business space.

Great point.

Well as Kevin mentioned earlier. The heavier lift comes when you’re going to try to seek certification to numerous standards at the same time. And we assist our customers in doing that. They can become heavier of a lift and require additional resources and time from the company and our programs have tools in place to be able to assist them through that.

Yeah. And to your point, Xavier, making sure this is done right because of a lot of the let’s just call it interpretation of these standards is another place where you potentially save money because if you implement yourself, you have no one to help you when you go through that certification audit, you have no one to, you know, fight the fight for you when your interpretation is considered wrong. And so that could also be another place where you lose money if you go through implementing yourself, go through the certification audit, and they try to fail you and have no one to back you up with the interpretation understanding.

So really, I mean, that kind of leads into my next point, which is why working with a consulting firm like CORE is always the best way for a company to find themselves in the right position to pursue this kind of work. We encourage you to explore your options as anybody would. But in the government contracting space, everything moves very fast, and implementing ISO internally normally takes 2 to 3 times longer. I mean, there’s no guarantee. You know, when you go through it by yourself, it’s just a headache.

And you might focus on the wrong thing.

Yeah, absolutely.

I know that. You know, we’ve had consultants talk about what I’ve talked to on the podcast. It’s like, you know, people prep before they reach us, and they have more documentation than they need, and they weren’t working on the right thing to help us. And we’re like, that’s way too much. You don’t need all that we kind of need to be focused on over here. So, helping hands are important.

Even in the sales process, we get those packets of information and sometimes the files are too big to open in an email.

Yeah, true story.

But yeah, I’ll just, you know, say one last time that, you know, Core has put itself in a position where we understand this space well and we invest a lot of time into reading about it, going to all the different town halls, the different sessions that they have for different contracts, vehicles. And, you know, we’ve put a lot of time and effort into making sure that we understand it so that way our customers understand it if they choose to work with us.

Absolutely. So, Renee, what advice would you give a business aiming to establish a strong presence in government contracting through compliance with ISO standards?

My first piece of advice is to start as early as possible. Kevin already mentioned the fact that you know, government contracting provides a very truncated period for you to obtain certification. And so compared to the duration of our standard ISO certification programs, now, we’ve become very good at being more efficient. For government contracts, being able to start as early as possible provides the company with some breathing room. Rather than having to feel like you’re being shoved up against the wall.

The other piece of advice that I do have is really to have a plan for what resources internally you’re going to use for the project. In the seven years that I’ve been here, I think one of the biggest issues I’ve seen kind of present challenges as far as timeline goes, is with the number of individuals involved in the project. So, you know, larger groups with representation from all the different departments generate great discussion and it generates a lot of great brainstorming. Unfortunately, what happens sometimes is that it’s difficult to just land on a decision, and so progress is hard to make.

Another point to that is don’t feel like you must weed the herd by yourself. That’s part of what our consultants can help with, which is to help you understand who the best fits are for your management team.

Right. And back to Renee’s point, too, about, you know, having too many. The one thing about primarily ISO 9001, it puts in place that you have employee engagement.