Augury’s recent rebranding is an outward show of the company’s growth – in terms of both numbers and ambitions. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, other equally fundamental developments are taking place. For instance, Augury is hitting significant milestones in terms of ISO certifications. And much like Augury’s AI, it’s all about the quest for continuous improvement – step-by-step.
Quantity Backed By Quality
When Augury earned its ISO 9001 certification, it represented a major milestone. It showed the company’s commitment to process improvement and producing high-quality products that meet customer expectations worldwide. “Actually, we’re doing this to not meet – but to exceed – customer expectations,” smiles Gal Nevo, Quality Systems Leader at Augury.
“Our job is all about driving continuous improvement for an organization,” adds Yevgeny Poliakov, Head of Quality and Regulatory at Augury. “At Augury, it’s our responsibility to maintain and continually improve our products, services and relationships. And this is more than just getting the right certification. It’s about empowering our employees to work along with these increasingly engrained processes.”
“At the same time, it’s also very much a sign of Augury’s maturity as a company,” says Augury Co-founder and CEO Saar Yoskovitz. “You have to be at a certain stage to be able to establish a quality management system. Naturally, you always want to provide quality – but it gets easier if you can formalize the process.”
Explosive Growth Begets Explosive Environments
And the quality management process continues. In addition to ISO 9001, Augury also has ISO 27001 that relates to the risk management, cyber-resilience and operational excellence around managing information security.
Meanwhile, ISO 80079-34 is important for being part of what’s required for Augury to sell and deploy products in hazardous location (HazLoc) environments outside of US/EU markets. “Of course, all audits for certifications are challenging. But this audit for working in potentially explosive atmospheres was really challenging. With higher risks come stricter regulations. But we got through,” says Gal happily.
Augury’s Quality Policy:
At Augury we are obligated to effectively maintain and continually improve our products, services and relationships within the Quality Management System to exceed our customer expectation for Production Health by empowering our employees while keeping the highest integrity of our teams and solutions.
Step-By-Step
“Each and every ISO certificate represents a leap in the company’s maturity,” says Yevgeny. “But these are just part of a larger spectrum of continuous improvement, where we are building up step by step, small bite by small bite.”
“Rebranding, recruitment, partnerships can often steal center stage. Operational improvements are just as important but not always highlighted,” notes Gal. “This is all amazing. But there’s also a lot going on with operations, with R&D, and how we are now certified for many countries and establishing many more quality systems across the company.”
Winning Hearts And Minds
Not everyone welcomes the idea of establishing a quality management system. “At first, it can be scary for some people. They are not familiar with the structure, so they worry if they will lose some flexibility or be forced to do more work – with no added value,” says Gal.
“At one point they realize ISO is more about providing a baseline and a solid structure for scaling the business and building on our vision. It’s not about what to do or how to do it. It’s more about what should be included while building the system and standardizing it so all our customers have the same experience. All customers should be treated the same – so it doesn’t come down to luck that one customer might get more attention than the other.”
“In the end, it’s not the certification that matters most,” says Yevgeny. “It’s about setting up a gold standard of processes on which our employees can achieve their goals and our customers can be more successful.”
“It’s all about setting ourselves up for continued organizational growth.”
Measuring Change
Also, by setting a baseline, you create a means to measure improvement. “When you have a regular process, if a change is made, it can be better controlled and more easily measured to see if it’s effective. We can monitor better, measure better and establish smarter KPIs,” says Gal. “It’s a process of continuous improvement.”
“It’s the same with the ISO process. They come back every year with an ever-evolving checklist to make sure your system is still effective – and growing with the times and the evolving challenges. And we expect – and audit for – the same commitment from our subcontractors and suppliers.”
Team Effort
“It’s all about setting ourselves up for continued organizational growth,” says Yevgeny. “And naturally as a cross-functional effort, this is only possible if everyone, not just management, feels engaged and responsible.”
“All these achievements around quality management tell our customers Augury is no longer a startup. Rather, we’re a company that sells quality products, gives quality service, gets customer feedback, finetunes to the customer’s requirements and then makes sure the customers are more than satisfied. And we can now do this in a controlled and standardized manner,” says Gal.
”It was a huge effort behind the scenes to hit all these ISO goals,” says Saar. “But now the foundation is set. Now we can continue to build further.”
