Crowley’s Santos and São Paulo Offices Achieve ISO 9002 Registration

(Jacksonville, Fla.; April 20, 1999) – Crowley American Transport has achieved ISO 9002 registration for its key Brazilian offices of Santos and Sao Paulo, indicating the company has met the highly regarded international standards for quality in those locations.

In a commemorative ceremony last week in So Paulo, ABS Quality Evaluations presented Michael da Silva, Crowley vice president, South America, with a certificate of compliance encompassing eight departments, including documentation, maintenance and repair, operations, claims, equipment control, customer service, sales and marketing.

A three-day certification audit of those departments was conducted by ABS in late march and Crowley was found to be in total compliance. Last year, Crowley’s Jacksonville terminals and freight services department became the first areas to achieve ISO 9002 registration.

“We are extremely pleased to have achieved this designation in Brazil,” said Tom Crowley Jr., Chairman, President and CEO of Crowley Maritime Corp. “I congratulate all of our valued team members who contributed to this success and who will continue to uphold these high quality standards.”

“By the end of 1999, we expect to be ISO 9002 registered with most key company operations throughout the Western Hemisphere,” he said. “Crowley’s Rio de Janeiro, Novo Hamburgo and Curitiba offices, for example, are scheduled for ISO certification in October.”

ISO 9000 is a model for a quality assurance system that was established by the International Organization for Standardization, a worldwide federation of national standards organizations, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. ISO 9000 is a family of standards that is designed to help companies set up quality systems for the development, production, installation, testing and inspection of their product or service. Of the three main standards in the ISO family, ISO 9002 is the most applicable to Crowley.

The ISO quality management system essentially means that you must say what you do by writing procedures for your business processes, do what you say by following company procedures, and then prove it through internal and external audits. Crowley was audited and certified to be in compliance with ISO 9002 standards by ABS Quality Evaluations, Inc.

“We have been demonstrating our quality of service to customers for many years,” said Crowley American Transport President P. Elliott Burnside. “Achieving ISO 9002 registration helps to document this fact. It further indicates Crowley’s commitment to continuous improvement, to optimize key processes and to record them through procedures in order to meet our customers requirements the first time, every time.”

“It typically takes about one-and-a-half years to achieve ISO 9002 certification,” said Mark Bruns, Crowley manager of quality systems. “But because of our pre-existing quality programs, we were able to accomplish this feat in about seven months.”

“We are currently pursuing ISO 9002 registration at our terminal in Pennsauken, NJ, and with our Venezuela operations,” he said. “Other domestic operations, including terminals in Lake Charles, La.; Port Everglades, Fla., and San Juan, Puerto Rico, began the implementation process in late 1998. By the end of 1999, we expect most key operations to be ISO 9002 registered.”

The ISO 9000 management system upon which Crowley is evaluated includes 20 sections covering management responsibility, the quality system organization, contract reviews, document and data control, materials management, inspection and testing, non-conformance and corrective actions, quality records, internal quality audits, training and statistics.

Certification of compliance was handled by ABS Quality Evaluations, who itself is accredited by the Registrar Accreditation Board (RAB) United States and the Dutch Council for Accreditation in the Netherlands (RvA).

Crowley’s quality committee in Brazil, which spearheaded the drive toward ISO certification, consisted of Luis Stipanich, Katia Pimenta, Melissa M. da Silva, Valter Branco, Osvaldir Vaghetti, Jeronimo Lucena, Ernest Barga, Armando Ritchie and Alberto Luiz Caputi.

Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, Crowley American Transport provides cargo common carrier services between Canada, the United States and countries in Central America, South America and the Caribbean. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Oakland-based Crowley Maritime Corp., founded in 1892.

For more information about Crowley visit www.crowley.com.

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