About Slab
Audit week shouldn't cost what it costs.
Most UK engineering and construction SMEs spend two to four working days every year reconstructing evidence for an ISO surveillance audit. On a single £10m project last year, a quality manager spent thirty hours over four days pulling eighteen months of evidence into shape for a recertification. £4,500 of one person's time. Plus the corrective actions that didn't need to be raised. Plus the stress.
The work was done. The evidence existed. It just wasn't organised.
That pattern repeats across every UK SME holding ISO 9001, 45001 or 14001. Multiply the cost by the number of certified businesses in the country and the audit-week scramble is a multi-million-pound problem nobody chose.
Why now
Three things have changed.
The 10 Year Infrastructure Strategy commits £725 billion of public funding. The National Infrastructure Pipeline lists 734 projects worth £718 billion. The Procurement Act 2023, in force since February 2025, is the biggest reform of UK public procurement in a generation, explicitly designed to open the door to SMEs.
ISO 9001, 45001 and 14001 are the price of entry. Tier-one contractors and public-sector buyers filter on accreditation before they read the rest. Without it, tenders end before they begin.
AI has reached the point where reading a thirty-page evidence bundle and mapping every item to the right clause is a five-minute task, not a five-day one. The technical foundation that makes Slab possible at SME pricing did not exist two years ago.
What Slab does
A continuous evidence engine.
Upload a document. Slab finds the discrete evidence items inside, maps each to the right ISO clause with confidence and a page reference, and updates the dashboard so you can see in thirty seconds how audit-ready you are right now. When the auditor arrives, the structured evidence pack is one click away.
That is V1, live and accepting applications. V2 is planned for early 2027 and extends Slab into site capture (a phone-first app for incidents, near-misses and toolbox talks) and customer and supplier feedback loops.
What we believe
Compliance is the entire product.
When a technical decision comes up, the question is not what is fastest but what is right. The schema that holds your evidence is the schema your auditors will trace back through. The mapping that classifies a method statement as ISO 45001 Clause 6.1 is the mapping you defend when someone asks why. Cutting corners on the foundation makes the building unsafe.
Slab is opinionated rather than configurable. We have made the architectural decisions about evidence types, clause structure and audit pack format that twenty years of practitioner experience says are right. You start using the product the same day rather than configuring it for a quarter.
This is not positioning. It is how we choose between options when a trade-off comes up.
The founders
Built by practitioners, not vendors.
Sam Cartwright
HSQE
Twenty years on UK construction and civil engineering, including environmental works on HS2, with project values up to £20 million. Client liaison in the audit room. Slab is shaped by his experience first.
Dr Laura Cartwright MCIM
Commercial
Fifteen years building software products and commercial strategy for UK engineering and technology firms. Doctoral qualification, MCIM, three-time Non-Executive Director.
Slab is live and accepting applications.
The first 20 paying customers pay £74.50 per month in year one (50% off the standard £149/mo rate), receive all three ISO standards from day one, and have a direct line to the founders.