There are many reasons for jumping through the many hoops required to achieve ISO certification, and Tom Brooke did it for all the right ones. It’s making a difference. Like a 45% year-to-year increase in business in each of the last four months. Like a better on-time delivery record, though he was already approaching 100%. Like less driver turnover. Like better internal communication. He won’t attribute all those gains, and others besides, to the eight months of work that got him his ISO 9002 certificate this past February, but he says it certainly can’t have hurt.

Brooke runs Rideway Transport Inc. in Kitchener, Ont., a small truckload carrier serving some blue-chip clients in the automotive and packaging sectors along the Ontario-Michigan corridor. He has 40 owner-operators pulling his 120 van trailers, and they’re mighty busy. Last year Rideway hauled some 10,500 loads, and this year it’s going to approach 15,000. There’s more growth in sight.

Rideway joins a growing legion of smaller trucking companies seeking ISO registration. For many, it’s a matter of satisfying a customer that demands it, especially for carriers working in the automotive and chemical markets. Plenty of companies-in trucking and elsewhere-go grudgingly and resentfully through the process just so that they can hang a certificate on the wall. It’s a marketing ploy, with little commitment at the top to make it go further than just pleasing the customer. As a result, ISO registration-with periodic audits and ongoing commitments-becomes a costly millstone.

For Brooke, the motivation was entirely different. True, given that one of his prime customers is an automotive giant, chances are Rideway would have to become ISO-registered sooner or later. But the main reason is that Rideway is a family business that Brooke wants to see endure. He’s joined by his two daughters. Michelle is vice-president, finance, while Penny is vice-president in charge of operations. There are only seven other employees as all maintenance work is farmed out.

“ISO registration is a great benefit for a small company when you want to look at retirement and hand over the reins to someone in the family,” says Brooke. “It defines things, and that’s good when you’ve got two or three kids involved as I have. Even though they’re in completely different areas, there’s a structure they’ll have to adhere to.”

The ISO process, he knew, would expose them to all aspects of the company-including his own decision-making. Brooke says it has brought both harmony and cohesion in the way they work together.

“If you’re doing it for the right reasons, both internally and externally, then it’s good,” says Brooke. “But you’re already running at 99.6% on-time, what is there to offer? I mean, really, how much better can you get?”

Knowing Tom Brooke, it’s no surprise that he’s in the thick of a quest for quality and innovation. As the president of much bigger Frederick Transport in Dundas, Ont., more than a decade ago, he led the trucking industry into satellite communications. He’s still an energetic innovator, but several years back he decided to run his own firm rather than work for others.

Even before going to ISO, Rideway was a solid performer that did almost everything right. And the proof is that it took him only eight months to get his certification. Better yet, the management systems he and his ISO consultant, Rose Johnson, refined and devised, were so good that the auditors wanted only a couple of minor changes.

That’s rare. Getting ISO-registered is no small thing.

The first task is to understand it. The ISO 9000 standard, one of many, is not about quality control per se, rather it seeks to create a management framework and define the management practices that lead to quality. As Brooke says, “ISO is only qualifying your management of the quality process.” Another standard is ISO 14000, incidentally, which provides a similar framework for environmental management.

The body responsible for all of this is the International Organization for Standardization, based in Geneva, Switzerland. It’s a self-funding federation of national standards bodies from each of some 130 countries. Our ISO representative is the Standards Council of Canada.

Established in 1947, the organization promotes the development of world standardization mainly in order to facilitate the international exchange of goods and services. It’s easy to see that non-harmonized standards for similar technologies in different countries would in effect be technical barriers to trade. So far ISO has created some 12,000 international standards, including those for screw threads, freight containers, and bank cards.

The “9000”designation is in fact a series: 9001, which is common for manufacturers and has 20 elements that must be addressed; 9002, which is the one trucking companies would go for and which has 19 elements (the same as 9001 less the product design element); and 9003, with 16 elements (9001 less design, process control, purchasing, and servicing, as in after-sales service).

The first Canadian carrier to achieve ISO 9002 registration was what is now called TST Overland Express, but another of the early ones-in 1996-was White Oak Transport, a small carrier in Stoney Creek, Ont. Rose Johnson was responsible for that one, too-it’s run by her uncle, George Sharples. Through her company, Eden Associates in Burlington, Ont., Johnson has since helped a dozen trucking outfits in all.

What companies gain with certification, Johnson says, aside from the certificate on the wall, is clearly defined responsibilities and authorities; documented policies and procedures (an invaluable training tool); a better way to find the root causes of quality problems and customer complaints; and improved control during periods of growth or change. The main benefit is that you’ll have created new systems and formalized existing systems to help you achieve consistent quality of service.

Johnson notes that the ISO 9000 standard demands that there be a formal mechanism in place for getting customer feedback on how you’re performing. It forces you to track customer complaints and to devise a method of dealing with them.

“I’m finding that the small companies that do this tend to be the progressive ones like Rideway,” she says. “They’re just well-run little gems of companies that are proactive and quality-conscious, that will get ISO-registered because they want there to be a demand [for their services] down the road. They want to be ahead of the game.

“And then, once they get into it, without exception, they start to realize the internal benefits,” Johnson says. “And there are probably more of those than there are external benefits.” It’s important, however, for managers to keep ISO in perspective. You can create systems that provide consistency and thus get ISO certification without also providing quality, although the market would kill you. “We give same-day and next-day service to Michigan, which you have to do, but suppose we were selling three-day service,” says Brooke by way of illustration.

“Obviously, that would never fly in a competitive world, but if that’s what I had documented, and say I had a 100% on-time compliance rate, we could be ISO-qualified.

“ISO doesn’t really tell you what it takes to succeed in a competitive world. ISO documents what you’re doing, whether you’re competitive or not.”

The first thing you’ll need is an ISO consultant who knows something about trucking. Johnson says you can hire that person simply to guide you, or even to take it all on, create a procedures manual, and stay with you to the final audit. Brooke chose the latter route.

It’s not cheap, but the price tag will depend on company size, how well organized it is in the first place, and how much you want your consultant to do. Johnson says it’s tough to peg the cost, but you should count on “five figures.” And that doesn’t include the registrar’s cost that gets you your actual certificate. That’s another $5000 to $7000 for a small company like Rideway, which includes the main audit and the requisite follow-up audits over the certificate’s three-year lifespan.

The first thing Johnson did for Rideway was to create organizational charts that defined what people did and who made which decisions, “picking apart processes piece by piece and putting them back together again. You’re going to find holes and you’re going to have the opportunity to plug those holes as you go,” she says.

There are probably more hurdles for a small carrier, because they won’t necessarily have the same professional systems in place that you’re forced to have with a larger company.

“With small carriers, certainly you’ll end up with an improved structure. In many cases you started off with a couple of people, ma and pa, and never really defined processes very well,” Johnson explains. “The company has grown, and as it’s grown you’ve tended to lose that hands-on contact you may have had when you had only a few customers and maybe one or two drivers. It makes you look at the big picture instead of being wrapped up in the day-to-day things.”

Johnson’s specific goal at Rideway-demanded by the ISO standard-was to create a procedures manual in which every quality-related task, every job was defined and documented. The final Rideway manual, like most others would be, contains eight elements or procedures that would be common to small trucking outfits, and eight that would not.

“Usually there’s more to be added in small companies, more of the structural management things,” she explains. “About half of the procedures you’ll end up with in your quality documentation are things that you’ve always done, though we may have improved them in some way. Roughly the other half will be things that are new, things that are stipulated under ISO, that you have to formalize. To my mind-and this is important-there’s really nothing in that standard that isn’t just good business sense.”

There are 16 procedures in the Rideway manual: dispatch; freight handling (driving); equipment maintenance; rate quotations; billing; employee qualification and training; purchasing and supplier approval; accidents and claims; control of quality system documentation; control of software systems; corrective and preventive action; internal quality auditing; management review; control of quality records; statistical techniques; and pallet control.

Three sections are especially important to Brooke. “Internal quality auditing,” for example, means that employees must be trained to perform periodic systems audits. He rotates the responsibility so that people come to know other parts of the company.

The procedure titled “Corrective & Preventive Action” details how to use a form called a “Corrective Action Request,” or CAR for short. A CAR doesn’t have to be triggered by a customer complaint but can come from an internal source, from an employee who’s noticed a problem in the making. In that event, customer complaints can be headed off before they happen.

“Management Review” refers to the need for regular management meetings, something that didn’t always happen at the pre-ISO Rideway. Like many small companies, things often ran in a seat-of-the-pants sort of way.

“Sometimes you overlook things, you lose sight of things,” says Brooke. “You get busy and you forget, or you feel too busy to have that management meeting. Things start sliding. This forces you to adhere to a schedule, and to document it. What ISO really does is force you to do things in the proper manner.”

The result, Brooke explains, is that people at the company see a way of doing business that they didn’t see-or couldn’t see-before. “I should have told them more, but you get so busy and you just do things because you know that’s how,” Brooke says. “I can’t explain 30 years in the industry and tell them that’s why I made that decision every time. There had to be a way to bring them in, and ISO is a way to do it.

“I’ll tell you, if somebody wanted to retire but didn’t know how to handle it, I’d say, ‘Why don’t you get ISO-qualified?’ People don’t see that as a benefit.”

So is Tom Brooke planning to retire? Heck, no! He says he loves trucking too much to quit just yet. With tongue in cheek, he says he’ll still be working when he’s 90. And he’ll still be organized.