East Kimberley Job Pathways: ISO 9001 accreditation in Community Services

East Kimberley Job Pathways is a not-for-profit Aboriginal owned community development organisation, providing and promoting avenues to education, training and employment opportunities for people in the East Kimberley region. Since launching in 2013, the organisation has expanded its services beyond community development, to include an innovative social enterprise (Revive), a container recycling scheme (Containers for Change) and an NDIS initiative (Wayfinder).

As Quality & Compliance Manager, Claire Wimbridge oversees all areas of compliance across the organisation, alongside duties as Company Secretary. We spoke with Claire to find out how she uses LogiqcQMS to maintain East Kimberley Job Pathways’ ISO 9001 accreditation and keep track of compliance actions that arise.

How does your organisation currently use LogiqcQMS? 

We use LogiqcQMS predominantly for ISO 9001 accreditation. To be honest, I don’t think we would have achieved the accreditation if we didn’t have LogiqcQMS. It’s been such an easy way of demonstrating the steps involved in what we do across our services, and why we do it. In terms of specific features, we use the Risk framework for reporting requirements to the Board and for day-to-day risk assessments. We’ve also started working with the Board to use the target risk rating feature – it’s been helpful to enable us to monitor when we’re not achieving our target rating with the controls we have in place. We can then create actions to add to our mitigation plan so that we can bring the rating down to where required.

We also use the Incident register and assign any actions through Controlled Actions – that is one of my favourite new features! I use Controlled Actions daily for any of our registers that require a step-by-step process. That could be anything from incidents to customer feedback. This means that where we have a process outlined in our internal policies (designed for ISO 9001), those key controls can be incorporated into the framework and tasks are assigned right there and then. It gives me confidence that nothing will get missed but if it does, we can very quickly see it and cross it off. From a process perspective, we’re not having any non-conformances.

The contract register is the most regular register that we use. It’s so easy to search and quickly find what you’re looking for. Any compliance requirements that might come out of that contract is all linked to the same location and the review is assigned to someone who can then add notes – it’s all traceable.

LogiqcQMS was also integral to us achieving our White Ribbon accreditation a little while back. We worked with Logiqc to get the accreditation into our system so that we could match up any of the processes and documents we had at the time, to the recommended evidence. It was then easy to map out the gaps within the accreditation register and devise a plan for addressing them. All of this information was exportable, which was a great help!

How does LogiqcQMS support operational management within your organisation? 

We use LogiqcQMS as a management platform and assign tasks to Executive Management and key Corporate staff who have full accountability for closing the assigned action off and will delegate to their team through email or verbally. It’s quite easy for our CEO to assign ownership to her team and keep track of what has and hasn’t been actioned, which we review in a fortnightly management meeting.

Prior to implementing LogiqcQMS, East Kimberley Pathways was operating from a paper-based QMS, so you can imagine the steps it took to get us to where we are now! We came from a system where we would continuously be searching for information from here, there and everywhere. We are 100% online now and that has made the world of difference. No more chasing our tails trying to find information that might be filed somewhere or in an archive box out the back.

How will the soon to be released assets and maintenance registers better support your organisation? Can you share your experience of co-creating this feature with Logiqc?

About 18 months ago, we approached the Logiqc team to express our interest in an assets register. We were thrilled when Bret said that it was in the works! We wanted to get involved in the development where possible and give our views on how it might look for us. My team were lucky to have a demonstration recently and they are very excited by the result. From what we’ve seen, it looks like it’s going to be very easy to create repair schedules for individual assets, which will be helpful to stay on top of everything. It seems the rollover from where we are now, to the new register will be very straightforward. Once this migration is done, we’re looking forward to what the registers will enable us to do.

What have been the biggest gains for East Kimberley Job Pathways in using a technology-based QMS? 

The time. Being able to type in what you’re looking for and have it pop up with other related items in the search, as opposed to manually searching for something in a physical filing system, has been game-changing for us. It has given us so much more time to be able to make strategic decisions. Having a process-driven system is giving us more information as an organisation than we would have had before. Through our internal audits and external ISO 9001 audits, we can quite clearly see the improvements over the past three years. It’s satisfying to see how far we’ve come.  

Transitioning to LogiqcQMS has removed the admin aspect entirely – now, if we have an invoice for something, it is just drag and drop, no printing and filing. It’s meant we can really step away from paper which is better for the environment too.