Cortex Design Attains ISO 9001:2015 Certification

Today we’re proud to announce that Cortex has officially received our ISO 9001:2015 Certification!

At Cortex, we’ve spent the past several years distilling our mission and goals into a core statement: we develop human-centred products that improve people’s lives. Based on empathy-led ethnographic research, we visualize human experiences, design products to enable those experiences, and manufacture the solution.

That’s the simplest statement of the objective we’ve always pursued. Over the past several months, we’ve defined and documented every process that goes into that objective — with the goal of measuring every factor that goes into our customers’ success.

The team worked alongside premier regulatory consultant Paul Needler to develop and implement our Quality Management System. This involves a deep analysis of every aspect of the business:

• We took our Cortex Design playbook developed over the past 15 years, and conducted a gap analysis between our existing standards and the ISO 9001:2015 requirements.
• We then organized our playbook into policies, procedures, and work instructions.
• We measured these three factors against the requirements, and expanded our documentation to ensure that we meet our quality objective in every facet of our business.
• We identified and implemented a framework for continuous improvement through audit results, corrective actions, preventative actions, and management review.

In short, we’ve documented the process by which Cortex delivers its services, and outlined steps to make sure that process is followed in everything we do.

Congrats to the team for all their hard work to complete the system and help make Cortex a top-tier design firm in Canada. We couldn’t be more proud to see those efforts come to fruition with ISO 9001:2015 certification.

Cortex Design’s full quality policy is as follows:

Cortex Design develops human-centred products that improve people’s lives.  We visualize human experiences, design the products that support those experiences, and manufacture the solution.  Cortex seeks to understand our client’s challenges with an empathy-led research and discovery process. We champion the user in all aspects of our work, from initial research to final engineering and production.

Cortex has built and implemented a Quality Management System (QMS) based on ISO 9001:2015 to articulate our design process. This QMS supports Cortex’s mission to produce human-centred products and exceptional customer experiences for our clients. Our QMS is backed by efficient internal processes, highly qualified staff, and our leadership’s commitment to continuous improvement.

Cortex drives its customers’ success by setting and fulfilling clear and measurable goals that include timelines, costs, and product requirements. Cortex commits to its quality objectives by measuring our goals at each project phase, and using that feedback in our Quality Management Reviews.

Want to understand our process further? Check our our Methodology Page, or download our e-book: How to Make Profitable Projects for more info!