First UK businesses to meet the requirements of BS 11000

Press release - 7 June 2011

Recognising the important competitive benefits that effective collaboration can offer, EMCOR Group (UK), Lockheed Martin, NATS, and Raytheon UK have become the first businesses in the UK to be certified by the British Standards Institution (BSI) as meeting the requirements of the new BS 11000 standard for Collaborative business relationships.

The key concept behind BS 11000 is that organisations that work together can achieve much more than they can achieve alone. Key business benefits cited by the newly certified organisations include the positive influence the collaborative effort has on achieving and sustaining growth; enhanced success when responding to bidding opportunities; easier optimisation of customer service; and ability to use the standard as the basis for building a whole spectrum of measurable supplier and customer relationships.

Adrian Miller of NATS, the UK provider of air traffic control services, commented: “NATS successfully uses BS 11000 when working with our partner suppliers and we are now starting to use it with our customers. We have introduced it into our relationship with a major airline and will be piloting it with them in 2011. We also intend to use it to support our growth strategy by successfully demonstrating the benefits of our collaborative capabilities and practices when bidding for external business opportunities.”

“Our industry is driven by European consolidation and NATS is making sure that it is at the leading edge of thinking and best practice in business relationship development.”

Speaking on behalf of EMCOR Facilities Services, Managing Director Nick Morris commented, “It has long been recognised within EMCOR that sustaining long-term relationships with key customers is vital for the success of our business as well as our client’s future growth aspirations. “We were delighted to be the first organisation in the facilities management sector to be awarded certification to the new British Standard.”

“EMCOR is different,” he continued, “not only in the services that we deliver, but in the way that we work and integrate with our customers. Ultimately we envisage that the whole spectrum of our relationships, from the preferred and valued members of our supply chain, through to our key customers, will be measured against this new and important business standard.”

Aviation and defence specialist, Lockheed Martin was equally enthusiastic about the benefits of collaborative relationship management. “Certification provides a tangible demonstration of our strengths in working with partners,” said company spokesperson Phil Rood, “and it also underlines Lockheed Martin’s strong commitment to collaborative working as way of achieving and maintaining the best possible service to our customers. We are confident that our BS 11000 certification will deliver both immediate and long-term benefits for us and for the organisations with which we do business.”

“In today’s business environment, very few organisations exist in a vacuum,” said John Osborne, Product Manager at BSI. “Supply chains, partnerships and joint ventures are very much the order of the day. We are delighted, therefore, to be presenting our first BS 11000 certificates, as we believe that this standard and its related certification scheme offer a proven framework to guide organisations in their pursuit of the benefits of collaboration. Collaboration is now an essential requirement for business success and, for many organisations, the price of failure is to cease trading!”

Notes to editors

The innovative BS 11000 standard provides a framework for collaborative business relationships, which helps companies to develop and manage their interactions in a way that maximises benefits for all parties.

BS 11000 supersedes the older publicly available standard, PAS 11000, and all four of the newly certified organisations have made the transition from the former standard. The new standard places greater emphasis on continual review than its predecessor, and is more closely aligned with other management system standards.

The standard has, therefore, been formulated to provide the guidance and support needed to ensure the efficiency and success of collaborative efforts. It adopts an eight-stage approach carefully designed to allow organisations of any size and in any sector to apply best practice principles to their own ways of working, thereby getting the very best from their business relationships.