Mr. Norman R.A. Smyth, President of Thales Systems Canada Inc. of Ottawa, Ontario, announced today that the company had been formally certified by the Standards Council of Canada at the level of ISO 9001. Today’s announcement, coupled with Thales Systems’ accreditation on 26 July 1996 by Carnegie-Mellon's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Level 2 of their Capability Maturity Model (CMM), places Thales Systems in an exclusive community of companies which operate at these levels for quality innovation and software development.

In making the announcement, Mr. Smyth noted that "our new credentials put us in a position to bid on many very demanding projects in which we could not participate before. We are also seeing new opportunities which mandate compliance with these standards and, having reached these major plateaus in our growth, we are not about to let our standards fall as we will continue to strive for excellence in all areas and continual improvement in our engineering and management practices and processes." Mr. Smyth also pointed out that the company had been working for some time at the ISO 9001 level but had not gone ahead with formal certification –"we put the formal process off until we were certain that we had taken all of the required steps and that our procedures were in proper order. Our delay was justified when we were recommended to the Standards Council on our first attempt." He also noted that "the SEI audit actually showed that Thales Systems was working well above the Level 2 requirements and that it should achieve Level 3 accreditation within the next twelve months."

Thales Systems, based in Ottawa, Ontario, is a systems integration company which designs, develops, and delivers defence, aerospace, and civil systems on a turnkey, full-supported basis. The primary business areas of Thales Systems are command, control, and communications (C³) and countermine systems. The company has extensive capabilities and expertise in C³ technologies including sensors, communications, weapons, navigation, robotics, software development, and integrated logistics support. Thales Systems is a subsidiary of Thales, the world’s third largest defence/aerospace electronics company with 49,000 employees and revenues of $8.5 billion.