Our Quality Management approach is a corporate commitment to enhancing customer value by establishing and adhering to engineering processes that are based on recognized international standards such as ISO, CMMI and ITIL. Apptis is ISO 9000:2001 certified and is appraised at CMMI Maturity Level 2. We are aggressively pursuing CMMI Maturity Level 3 with an expected appraisal during the second quarter of 2009. The Executive Management team has initiated programs to ensure that all appropriate projects operate at CMMI Maturity Level 2 regardless of appraisal status. This ensures consistent and high quality work products for our customers while enabling early identification of issues through internal quality audits and site visits.

Our Quality Assurance (QA) Program provides a set of planned, systematic activities that validate work products as well as the processes which generates the work products ensuring conformance to established company technical requirements. During the development life cycle, QA personnel are integrated with the engineering teams to verify conformance to the established standards through reviews and audits of the software work products and activities. The QA representative reports these independent results to project stakeholders. The QA representative uses the following steps to ensure continuity and conformance of a project’s work products:

• Ensures project adherence to written QA policy.
• Establishes a plan of action for QA reviews and activities.
• Performs a verification that a project’s work products and processes adhere to applicable standards, procedures, and requirements.
• Follows up on corrections of identified defects or noncompliance issues with a work product before using or delivering that work product.
• Performs QA audits on a scheduled periodic basis.
• Provides ongoing communication of QA activities with stakeholders.
• Ensures noncompliance issues that cannot be resolved within the project are escalated to senior management for resolution.
• Provides ongoing reporting on the results of the review process and collection of metrics.
• Conducts an evaluation of the peer review process and reporting the results to the project manager and senior management.

To further enhance our Quality Program, we have established technical competency centers. The mission/charter of the competency centers is to provide recommendations on best practices, work efficiencies, and technology trends. The technical competency centers are:

• Software and Systems Engineering,
• Network Engineering,
• Information Assurance,
• Enterprise Management,
• Quality Management, and
• Program Management.

Each of the competency centers are led by a highly respected and senior technical professional within the company. The competency centers provide a virtual forum for Communities of Interest (COI) to interact with a community of expertise with opportunities for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and process improvement.