Offshore / Nearshore: ISO certification, official press release and details

It was a nice Christmas present offered by the French Standardization Office: Pentalog passed ISO-9001: 2008 certification on December 24, 2008!This achievement stands for international recognition of Pentalog’s commitment in terms of quality and of the improvement process Pentalog has been involved in since September 2007. This process was meant to improve internal efficiency and customer satisfaction, by fulfilling two obvious and unquestionable needs:-increasing the final quality of software and solutions offered to Pentalog’s clients.-improving Pentalog’s capacity to support its clients’ growth, while meeting quality standards.The ISO 9001 quality standard provided the right framework for this approach. As a general standard, ISO 9001 defines a list of organizational requirements necessary for the existence of a quality management system (QMS) with four directions: commitment and responsibility of the Management board , identification and management of processes contributing to customer/employee satisfaction, protection of skills, continuous improvement. A QMS based on ISO 9001 helps improving customer care, so as to offer products or services that meet the customer’s needs. Internally, it also emphasizes skills management, optimization of the use of resources through greater involvement of the staff and improvement of the entity’s processes. Pentalog has chosen the ISO 9001 standard because it will provide large and transverse company foundations allowing to turn towards more specific systems such as CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) or the EFQM excellence model in the future.Pentalog’s pragmatic QMS offers a more formal working environment, based on common tools and methods, implemented in a systematic manner by all the collaborators, within projects as well as in the scope of purchase management, HR management, infrastructure management, marketing, sales or communication. The implementation of Pentalog’s QMS was achieved along with a close collaboration with its clients, who could already measure the progress made.The certification perimeter of Pentalog includes all activities offered to its clients: Software design and development, application maintenance, technical support, infrastructure management and Business Process Outsourcing.It applies to all currently existing Pentalog offices, that means Orléans (headquarters), the Romanian offices (Brasov, Bucarest, Iasi and Sibiu) and the Moldovan-one (Chisinau), as well as the common Pentalog-Ausy branch, Pentalog Technology, in Brasov. The Pentalog Technology office in Sibiu was being created at the time of the audit, so it should enter the certification perimeter in 2009; the Pentalog office in Hanoï (Vietnam) should get certified in the next two years.Being involved in a continuous improvement process through the ISO standards, in 2009 Pentalog will begin to integrate different elements from other systems such as CMMI or EFQM (work units, Balanced Scorecard…) within its methods and processes.