Allan Marshall: Setting High Standards After almost 40 years in quality roles of one sort or another, you could say that Allan Marshall has earned his semi-retirement – what he calls the fifth phase in his illustrious career. Relaxing on his patio overlooking Lake Serenity in the Gold Coast, he shares with Accreditation News his memorable moments, as well as his frustrations with bureaucratic standards and certification processes.
Allan Marshall has carved an impressive depth of expertise in a range of quality control, quality assurance and quality management roles. His quality/standards career was shaped early as metallurgist and senior welding engineer with Head Wrightson Teesdale, a heavy engineering company in the UK. Marshall was instrumental in developing a range of quality plans for the manufacture of major equipment for nuclear power plants in the late 1960s.
“We were discovering the problems from the operating nuclear power stations as we were building the new ones, which then needed major design changes and rework as we were building them,” Marshall explains. “These were the very early days of quality systems; before standards existed in the form they do today.”
Marshall arrived in Australia in 1971 and joined Commonwealth Engineering in Brisbane. Two years later he joined SEAQ/QEGB, where he found himself addressing the issue of failures in operating power stations as well as dealing with the challenges of constructing a major new power station at Gladstone.
“There were almost always preventable problems at the design and manufacturing stages so I recommended mechanisms to prevent them,” Marshall recalls. “In 1975, we started to apply partial quality management system requirements to contracts for Gladstone units 5 and 6. The trial worked so well that three years later we specified that all future contracts for the building of power stations in Queensland would require quality systems based on Canadian standards Z 299 series.”
QEGB became part of the Queensland Electricity Commission and as senior QA engineer in 1979, Marshall carried out his first quality audits in Japan at Toshiba and Hitachi factories which were manufacturing turbines. “We saw established, large-scale quality systems in Japan which didn’t exist in Australia at that time,” he says. “One Japanese company that employed 30,000 people collected our audit team by car at one end of one manufacturing facility to drive us 1 km to the beginning of the next. There was nothing like it in Australia.”
In 1986, a new Queensland state purchasing policy was introduced, which required any business supplying products or services to the Queensland government to have a quality system in place. With some 15,000 suppliers to government, says Marshall, it seemed a good time to become a consultant.
The same year, Marshall founded QA Consultancy Services, and until he sold the business 10 years later, the company helped almost 300 companies to set up their quality systems. QA Consultancy Services also provided audit services to Lloyds Register’s quality assurance services, which was one of the first certification bodies operating in Australia.
In 1993, the establishment of JAS-ANZ in Australia prompted Marshall to start QA Certification Services. “Smaller certification organisations such as QA Certification Services would have found it extremely difficult to gain business if an accreditation body like JAS-ANZ didn’t exist,” he explains.
Marshall subsequently went into partnership and QA Certification Services was renamed Benchmark Certification, eventually becoming its sole owner again in early 2005. “Our strategy was to set up Benchmark differently from other certification bodies. We set up client managers who were sub-contractors and who were allowed to build a client base under the Benchmark banner, so they had a much greater client focus,” Marshall says. “Instead of having auditors who only audit and suffer from auditor burn-out, we had sub-contractors who were consultants, trainers and auditors. The policy was that they would never be auditing 100% of the time.”
In August 2006, BSI Management Systems Australia & New Zealand, a wholly owned subsidiary of BSI Group, acquired Benchmark Certification. Marshall stayed on as Technical Director until August 2008 as part of the contractual handover.
Now semi-retired, Marshall is sub-contracted back to BSI for a defined length of time to manage Benchmark’s overseas agents in Indonesia, India, Iran, Turkey, Malaysia and Thailand. He also does some auditing, and has returned to his old field of management consulting.
Although owned now by BSI, the certified clients in those overseas markets in Indonesia, India, Iran, Turkey, Malaysia and Thailand are still branded as Benchmark because of the level of recognition built up in those markets.
Standards: too slow, out of date
Marshall was chairman of standards committee QR/1 which developed AS 2990 in 1987 and AS 3905.2: Guide to ISO 9000 series for Construction in 1993. He also became chairman of standards committee QR/6, which was the first Australian committee to co-develop an Australian Standard with an international standard (quality auditing standards ISO 10011 and AS 3911) with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Although Marshall is still a member of the QR/6 committee, he has become critical of the international standards making process.
“The ISO standards making process is highly formalised and time-consuming, and the committee process is laborious,” he says. “We ought to be producing updated documents and more challenging standards in Australia – probably as Handbooks – and release them before ISO versions, so that Australian industry and services can develop well ahead of the ISO series. If we follow the ISO path only, the standards and industry will always be out of date. For example, the ISO 9001 standard has remained almost unchanged since it was issued in 2000. The 2008 version which was released recently has fewer than 50 words changed; hardly a challenge for continual improvement!”
JAS-ANZ changes: for better or worse?
When JAS-ANZ was formed in 1991, Marshall was a founding member of the first accreditation review panel. He is concerned, however, that the organisation has moved away from its original charter. “Its role is to overview the whole industry; it is supposed to be the joint accreditation system of Australia and New Zealand, yet it is servicing countries all over the world,” he says. “I think it needs to increase the focus on Australia and New Zealand.”
Marshall explains that one of Benchmark’s marketing advantages overseas several years ago was that it could market itself as an Australian company with reputable JAS-ANZ accreditation. Now that JAS-ANZ independently accredits companies in the same overseas markets, Benchmark and other Australian companies no longer have that unique marketing advantage. “It undermines some of the competitiveness that we had,” Marshall explains. “I believe it has stopped a certain amount of development of the conformity assessment bodies (CABs) here.”
The danger of restrictive audit guidelines
Marshall is passionate about the need to simplify how integrated quality, environmental and OH&S management systems are audited. “We’ve got three standards which apply but they almost have to be treated separately under the rules,” he says. “This means we generally have to quote an excessive number of audit days placing a financial burden and bureaucratic penalty on clients.”
IAF/JAS-ANZ requirements for CABs specify a certain number of audit days depending on the client’s size and number of employees. According to Marshall, the current requirements are overly restrictive. “In reality, the key to an excellent and useful audit depends more on the quality of the auditor than the number of days you spend auditing,” he says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if more clients consider non-accredited certification that is more flexible in dealing with integrated management systems and which allocates a reasonable number of days rather than the regulated number of days. Reputable auditors who move from accredited to non-accredited bodies will take their reputation and credibility with them.”
Guidelines also prevent CAB auditors from offering management advice or contributing to the improvement of the companies they are auditing. “This leads to the auditing process not adding as much value as it could,” says Marshall. “This is frustrating for auditors, and it’s one reason why they decide to become consultants or work with the companies rather than being an auditor.”
This article is based on an interview with