A DIAGEO employee scooped a top accolade in this year’s Scottish Quality Management Centre (SQMC) Quality Awards.

York native Aimee Gibson won the ‘Lead Auditor Student of the Year’ award after scoring SQMC’s first ever 100 per cent on the final ISO 9001 Lead Auditor exam.

She currently works as part of the liquid commercialisation team at Diageo in Menstrie, which not only deals with the commercialisation of new products, but also the quality in the supplier production chain.

Her training in lead auditing has meant that she is now more involved with the audits of suppliers and will soon take the lead on them.

She said: “I had never been involved in quality management or auditing before, so everything I’ve learned has been really helpful to establish my involvement in the supplier management side of what my team does and ensuring that all suppliers conform to the high standards that Diageo expects.

Karen McKenzie, who awarded Aimee, said, “All of the final exams are double marked, so for two of our directors to agree that Aimee’s paper was faultless is commendable.

“SQMC currently has a 94% pass rate for its IRCA-accredited Lead Auditor course, which is 20% higher than the worldwide average, and Aimee’s score will only help to bump it up even further and set a new benchmark.

“She was a great student and is a great advertisement for the ISO 9001 Lead Auditor students.” SQMC is a unique British training organisation that has progressed from a think-tank of Stirling University’s Management Science faculty to become one of Europe’s leading providers of Quality Management Systems qualifications globally accredited by the International Register of Certificated Auditors (IRCA).