Meet Our Partners - Assent Risk Management

25 August 2020

This months Meet Our Partner is consultancy Assent Risk Management. Jazmin Taylor discusses their expertise in a range of widely used ISO standards.

What standards can you help NQA clients with?

ISO 9001:2015 [Quality Management]
ISO 14001:2015 [Environmental Management]
ISO 27001:2013 [Information Security] + ISO 27031, ISO 27017, ISO 27701, ISO 20000 & ISO 27018
ISO 22301:2019 [Business Continuity]
ISO 45001:2018 [Occupational Health and Safety]
IATF 16949:2016 [Automotive Quality Management]
AS9100 [Aerospace Quality Management]

About your company

Assent Risk Management began as an IT company back in 2002 and has been evolving ever since.

In 2007 the company began to see a need for Information Security support within IT companies, so we began offering ISO 27001 which we pride ourselves on being our specialist area of expertise.

We have now been running and operating as we are today since 2011, offering a large variety of ISO support and consultancy services to many happy clients and also boast a 100% certification rate.

Why do you like working with NQA? How do you benefit from the relationship? Why did you choose to work in partnership with NQA?

We first heard of NQA in 2014 – we had clients coming to us who were already with NQA but required some internal support and we have been working in collaboration with NQA since around 2015.

We would like to continue to improve our relationship with NQA through a referral service, we currently work closely with many Certification Bodies and offer a referral for referral agreement.

We find that clients are very happy with NQA due to being more cost effective than other Certification Bodies.

Top tip for people looking at certification?

Our aim is to help companies understand, implement and utilise their chosen standard(s) as efficiently as possible. We provide specific, useful templates and documents while ensuring a consultant is onsite and approachable in order to to help you achieve certification.

Our advice would be to allow yourself plenty of time and understand that implementing and maintaining a full running system from scratch is not something that can be done within a matter of days. But don't panic - we provide onsite support and guidance and with our unique back office team also at your disposal you will never be left in the dark.

What do you find is the most common point of misunderstanding regarding certification or specific standards when visiting clients? What information do you have to clarify most often?

We have often found that organisations do not always understand the difference between our side of the ISO project (consultation) compared to the Certification side. So we make sure that we explain that we are here to aid with the start of their project by getting them working effectively to the clauses of their chosen standard by providing onsite consultancy, templates, documents and internal audits. Then Certification Bodies externally audit the systems we have helped put in place and following this Certification is achieved.

Anything else you think our readers might like to know/hear?

Assent provide much more than ISO implementation, we also offer ongoing ISO support such as Internal Audits, Gap Analysis, Legal Register Consultancy, GDPR and more. We can currently provide support across the UK.

NOTE -

For more information please visit us at:

Twitter: @assent1
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/associate-enterprises-ltd-t-a-assent/
Website: www.assentriskmanagement.co.uk/

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* Disclaimer:

NQA does not provide consultancy in order to remain impartial from management systems implementation.

NQA shall not imply that certification would be simpler, easier, faster or less expensive if a consultancy listed on the ACR is used.

ACR Consultants shall not imply that NQA certification would be simpler, easier, faster or less expensive if their services are used.

NQA remains impartial from our partners on our Associate Consultant Register and does not endorse one partner over another.

‘Our consultants’ do not work for NQA, they work as independent bodies in partnership with us through our Associate Partner Programme. In accordance with the accreditation standard ISO 17021-1:2015 NQA does not provide consultancy in order to remain impartial from management systems implementation.