The Chambre des notaires du Québec is a professional order which groups together the 3319 or so notaries of the province. As in the case of the other professional orders, its principal purpose is to ensure the protection of the public which has recourse to the services of its members.

Mapping business processes for a successful ISO implementation (Interview - March 19th, 2009)

Bertrand Lortie, assistant general manager of the Administrative service.

Can you explain your role within the CNQ?

"My role is to assist the other branches and to provide them the working tools they need to carry out their missions. This has to do with three areas of activity: human resources, financial resources and material resources. I am also responsible for maintaining the ISO 9001 accreditation received recently. With these considerations in mind, I am always standing up to ensure that the operations between the Chamber and Notarius are going well; Notarius is a technological subsidiary that provides us the necessary expertise and manpower in order to maintain the accreditation."

What were the contexts and the issues set at the beginning of the project?

"At the start, the two major issues concerning the project were on the one hand to ensure that the operations would be achieved in the most efficient way (with a process optimization approach), and on the other hand to be able to document the processes in order to assist the next generation and the business stability with young workers available to replace those retiring, particularly in our organization where some of us have some thirty years of service. Thereafter, we have added a new dimension to the project: ISO.

We had a first experience with a pilot project in which we have done the process documentation and optimization, and then we realized that it was essential to repeat the operation in all directions of the Chamber."

What were the targeted goals for this project?

"Our initial target was to complete the process documentation in all activity areas within a two year period.

The project started in February 2005, and after those two years, the goal was not reached yet. Meanwhile, we thought that it was essential to look deeply into the approach concerning some of the business processes. Our new goal was then to find solutions and improvements when deemed necessary, and especially to implement them, which increases the workload. Even today, we pursue that goal within an approach aimed at steady improvement and focused on efficiency.

When we decided to get the ISO 9001 accreditation, we set April 2009 as the target date. In the end, we met the deadline a few months earlier as we are certified since January 2009."

More generally, documenting our processes helped us to bring together all concerned employees around a table so that they could talk about their various ways of working and discuss about them in order to agree together on the best practice model to be adopted."

What was your approach to implement the project?

"The decision came directly from the senior management. Thereafter, all managers were involved and the project was introduced to all employees. The cartography part as well as the improvement section have been achieved simultaneously. As for the choice of QUALIGRAM, we have made the decision before considering ISO certification which was not a goal at this time. In terms of Taktika’s consultants, they have helped us to build our project plan which has been achieved in the fall of 2006 and anticipated a one-year project."

Why QUALIGRAM was chosen as a documentation tool for your internal processes?

"We were first interested in the opportunities offered by the tool Visio only but it did not look like a complete tool to document our processes in an efficient way. Several reasons explain why we chose QUALIGRAM solution: this software is already well in place in France and it is supported by AFNOR standard, there is a French version and it represents a worthwhile financial investment. In conclusion, QUALIGRAM e-server module is very interesting to provide information to employees who can consult so easily the cartographies they need."

How do you assess the contribution of Taktika Management’s consultants with this approach?

"We have received a great support from Martine Courtemanche and Philippe Trahan of Taktika Management; they have had a number of interviews with different employees and managers of the CNQ that have helped us to define our processes. Beside the technological solution (QUALIGRAM), the advisor’s role has therefore been crucial. Yet, we are aware that we are not a specific organization and that it is not apparent for an external individual to understand our operation. As for the ISO 9001 certification, two other consultants, Denis Lafleur and Robert Fortier played an important role. If we had proceeded only from within internal resources, we would have spent much more time and we would be not much further ahead today in meeting our targets."

What are the major benefits your clients can get from the ISO 9001 certification?

"At the start, the ISO 9001 certification is a good way to improve the organization’s image. Within the business world, it offers mainly another approach to managers: for example, we use more management charts, what we did not do before.

What is going really to change for our clients is the fact of improving our quality of service: by having the opportunity to share our clients’ comments and claims as well as taking corrective steps to avoid them, we reduce the risk of making the same errors."

And the extension of the project, what will it look like?

"This project that was supposed to last two years has already been extended to four years. That was perfectly legitimate as we did need all that time to document our processes.

Now, due to the economic crisis, we have to cut investment in the project: yet, there is no question to put an end to the project because there is a need to continue to develop management tools in order to control our processes and to maintain our ISO certification. What is going to change is the fact that we must move more likely towards cost reduction measures and a fortiori towards process optimization rather than customer service.

Today, contrary to the launch of the project, we are in need of a return on investment in the short term. This will be possible with the achievements that have been accomplished until now such as: since our processes are documented, we can now optimize them in order to reduce our operating costs. We should be aware that documentation has to be one of the first key steps to be able to observe, to understand and to ensure the effectiveness of our business practices before moving on to the second step: moving forward towards efficiency."