From our roots in the Milk Marketing Board to our current status as a plc with subsidiaries supplying information to farmers, corporations, industry and government bodies our business depends on the trust that our customers and the industries in which we work have on the quality of our information.
We are a full member of ICAR (International Committee of Animal Recording). This is the body that sets standards procedures and guidelines for the purpose of identifying animals, the registration of their ancestry, recording their performance and their evaluation and publishing the findings. In 2008 we became the first UK service provider to be awarded the ICAR Certificate of Quality for Production Recording. This involved an audit of our recording practices by a qualifiied ICAR auditor ensuring that NMR is complying with up to date requirements and guidelines. Our payment testing laboratories are UKAS accredited. Accreditation is subject to annaul review and we have one full time staff member reporting to the Group Quality Manager to ensure day to day compliance with UKAS requirements.
Quality issues are reported to the NMR Board on a regular basis. We have a Group Quality Manager in a senior position reporting to the NMR Board through the Finance and Administration Director. The role allows executive authority on quality requirements to take precedence over the authority of other managers within the business.
Our software contains business rules that have been robustly tested to ensure that data is accurate before it is allowed to update our database. A simple example would be that an animal could not be born before insemination. A mistake like this could be made by error on the dates entered; our system would not allow it. There are numerous business rules, many of which are more complex than this that combine to reduce potential errors in data entry. Within the laboratories, the instruments are fully calibrated on a regular basis, with daily start up checks and pilot samples of known quality tested after every herd and within herds if the herd has more than 180 samples. The NMR, NML and iML laboratories regularly conduct ring trials to ensure the standards are equal throughout the NMR Group as well as our labs participating in international ring trials to ensure our testing standards are up to international standards. The final safety net is the training, experience, and quality of our laboratory and data processing staff.
We have groups drawn from staff in various departments of the business who meet regularly to discuss business issues. One such group, the Business Operations Group meets on a monthly basis to iron out procedures required to ensure that our information continues to pass our quality requrement. This group is charied by the Group Operations Manager. The Managing Director is an active member of this group.
