Ellenbrooke has helped Store Maintenance deliver maintenance and facilities services to retailers across the UK and Europe.
About Store Maintenance
Store Maintenance is a maintenance and facilities management company, serving both high street retailers and the leisure industry. Over 30 years, their business developed from a shop fitting outfit to an organisation providing 24-hour maintenance services and compliance testing solutions across the UK and Europe.
Achieving ISO9001: how Ellenbrooke helped
Store Maintenance required a robust management system to help them meet the needs of their clients consistently and effectively.
To achieve this, Ellenbrooke has helped them achieve and maintain the ISO9001 Quality Management standard for over 15 years.
ISO 9001 helps businesses identify and mitigate business risk and monitor and improve business performance. This leads to higher productivity, greater efficiency, reduced errors and waste and increased consistency in product or service delivery.
Our consultants translate the complex technical wording of ISO standards into processes and practices businesses can use.
Gary Van Blerk, Managing Director of Store Maintenance, explains:
“Our consultant, Terry Connolly, helped us understand how ISO9001 could meet our business requirements. Without someone like Terry, we would have found it difficult to apply the standard to our business and reap the benefits.
“Being ISO9001 certified is not about ticking a box or receiving a certificate. It’s about making sure we’re doing the best possible job every day. Having the standard in place with Ellenbrooke’s support, we are confident in what we do, and that confidence is shared by our clients, their bosses and our own staff.”
Maintaining long-term certification with Ellenbrooke Plus
Store Maintenance’s ability to keep meeting ISO9001 is due in part to their membership of the Ellenbrooke Plus scheme.
Through the scheme, businesses can pre-order a set number of hours with an Ellenbrooke consultant each year, arranged via a monthly standing order.
“Using Ellenbrooke Plus really helped us manage our budget for consultancy services,” explains Gary. “It helped our consultant determine what could be achieved with the hours we budgeted for and meet our expectations. This approach has helped us identify improvements to our business model.”
Terry Connolly has consistently updated Store Maintenance’s management system for many years. For businesses like Store Maintenance with a small team of staff, working with a consultant through Ellenbrooke Plus guarantees them ongoing maintenance of their management system, without needing to hire a full-time Quality Assurance manager at greater expense.
Switching to Ellenbrooke for Health and Safety Training
Health and Safety compliance is at the core of Store Maintenance’s business, and have always used outside consultancies to provide Health & Safety training and processes to their staff and contractor base.
“Our Health & Safety protocols have to be robust, given the range of services we provide and the numbers of staff and sub-contractors we need to protect,” explains Gary.
In June 2021, Store Maintenance decided to use Ellenbrooke to provide this training.
“Whilst our previous training provider gave sound advice, we were expected to write our own internal Health & Safety policies. We soon found we weren’t a big enough team to do this ourselves.
“In contrast, Ellenbrooke not only advised us, but they wrote up our policies for us too. They then integrated these policies into the management system they had previously designed for us, ensuring our Health & Safety policies complement the rest of our processes.”
Ellenbrooke has a long history of designing and delivering bespoke training programmes for businesses looking to improve the performance of their employees.
“Just a phone call away”
Gary has enjoyed working with consultants Terry Connolly and Ian Sparks for many years.
“It’s great to work with consultants who have such a passion and enthusiasm for their work. They understand what standards are appropriate for a business of our size, and they have been a trusted partners of ours for over 15 years.
“Looking ahead, we hope to achieve ISO14001 Environmental Management standard with Ellenbrooke, which we’ve been able to work towards through our Ellenbrooke Plus hours.”
