I often hear organisations get too fixated in simply complying with the Standard and focusing too much in obtaining an ISO 9001:2015 certification. Whilst it is important to tell your customers and the rest of your supply chain that you are certified to ISO 9001, organisations should focus in getting real value to their business … value that will help them last for the long term.
When employees know or think that they have a quality system that is certified to an international standard, sometimes it could present itself as a false sense of security. There is a risk that they are not making their Quality Management System, which was built prior to getting ISO certification, truly work for them.
ISO 9001:2015 Certification
When an organisation decides to get audited towards ISO 9001:2015 certification, they have to think really carefully, if this will add great value to their employees or teams, their processes, their business and most importantly to their customers.
Implementing a Quality Management System
To put into context, here are some examples of what you could get by implementing a Quality Management System in your organisation (which you would eventually certify to ISO 9001):
- You would increase confidence on the quality of your goods or services as it gets delivered to your customer. As an example this could increase your Delivery-In-Full-and-On-Time (DIFOT) measure and improve your specification accuracy.
- Your procedures are standardised across the organisation to ensure repeatability and efficient training with all staff. This would result into a productivity increase of your workforce and an increase in their skill level.
- All roles and responsibilities across the teams will be clear, transparent and agreed by everyone.
- When decisions are made, you would have a factual and systematic approach because recording, investigations, and analyses are performed.
- Problems are fixed forever by implementing a problem-solving methodology. This would result into a reduction of your quality defects and failures as well as inspection activities, which can be non-value adding.
- Wastes in reworking, remaking, repairing and re-building are significantly reduced if not completely eliminated.
- Your teams spend more time in performing value-add tasks and less time is spent in looking for information and tools or wondering what the standard procedures and work instructions are.
- Breakthrough and continuous improvements achieved will be sustained well as there is a process of standardising new practises. This is a very important step in change management.
The list could go endless in delivering real and tangible benefits and long-term reasons for truly implementing a Quality Management System (QMS). If done correctly, this would then bring great value to the customer and make them truly satisfied. This is the true certification.
