30 January 2014
Costain is a long-established British engineering and construction group. The company can boast a proud history of involvement in landmark projects, from the Trans-Iranian Railway in the 1930s to the Channel Tunnel in the 1990s and, more recently, London’s Crossrail project.
With clients demanding greater value for money from the construction industry, Costain’s standards journey began with the introduction of the quality management standard, ISO 9001. With this building block in place, the company has steadily embraced further standards on, for example, collaborative business relationships (BS 11000), information security management (ISO/IEC 27001), and business continuity management (ISO 22301).
Tony Blanch, Costain’s Business Improvement Director, says that the reasons for adopting each standard have varied. For example, in the case of the Information Security Management System standard, he says: “An increasing number of external people needing to access our systems. We had to come up with better ways to police this than just giving them our internal passwords. We soon realised that the standard isn’t just for IT, and looked at everything else too.”
