INTRODUCTION
Is the ISO 9001 standard of any real benefit to your organization? Does your ISO 9001 system save money, cost money or make money? Does it make your organization run more efficiently? Does it slow things down and add extra bureaucracy? Well it is supposed to be of benefit. That is the intent of the standard. If it doesn’t add value, make things run more efficiently and make money for your organization, then maybe it’s not the standard but how it has been implemented.
In many organizations certification to the ISO 9001 standard is generally a sham. The parts are in place as specifically required but whether the intent is being met is far from a sure thing. Many organizations developed their Quality Management Systems (QMS) for the first time back in the 1990s. The requirements then were far from robust. The consultants, auditors and managers involved in the process of certification and the implementation of management systems were far from competent. The system for implementation, assessment and certification was very much a cookie cutter process. Everyone at that time had a documented quality manual that had 19 sections which paralleled, almost sub-clause by sub-clause, the 19 sections of the requirement. Their policies where a direct copy of the standard.
Where the standard said The organization shall
their manuals said XYZ company will
. Beyond that the words were often a direct copy of the standard. As new versions of the standards were issued many companies, having experienced the initial implementation debacle, and seeing no value added from the implementation, simply revised the wording in their documentation in order to comply with the revised standards. I believe that because the initial implementation of ISO 9001 provided little or no value, organizations applied the basic paper clip and bubble gum fix in order to achieve the new requirements of the standard while applying a minimum in financial and manpower resources. I would like to say that the majority of registration auditors were not very accepting of this approach and drove change by demanding a process approach, but unfortunately that hasn’t happened. There have been some small changes in direction such as the addition of ‘Turtle Diagrams’ in many systems which on the surface would appear to be an improvement but in fact is another consultant money maker.
The ‘Turtle Diagram’ was a tool that was introduced to help auditors audit using a process approach and not to create better documented systems in organizations. Turtles should never have been used as a form for documenting systems or as a process for describing processes. This simply adds no value except for making the external auditor’s job easier which only applies if the Turtle Diagrams are robust and complete which few are.
Companies generate these documents for the same reason that they had the 19 chapter manual and regurgitated policies – to give the auditor what they wanted to see. And consultants saw Turtle Diagrams as a product that they could sell to companies. Nowhere in these processes has there been a significant effort to encourage organizations to create systems and processes designed, implemented and managed in order to create an effective, efficient, innovative and successful organization. It is time for those organizations that want to stop wasting money (on ISO implementation, registration and auditing) and start generating value by doing something different.
The release of the ISO 9001:2015 revision is an opportunity to start anew. It is a new standard in a new format. True, the requirements in it have changed very little but the context of the requirements have changed. The new focus on risk and on the context of the organization are themselves sufficient changes to encourage organizations to at least consider a significant overhaul of their systems. Maybe it is time to consider the original intent of the ISO standards and to take them seriously and to achieve the benefits that were originally intended.
In this article I will attempt to address the requirements of the standard not in platitudes or by repeating the requirements as they are written, but to discuss the requirements in more scientific term. In this article I will discuss the standard in terms of ‘Rational Thinking’ which is often in common language incorrectly referred to as ‘logic’. This article assumes that an organization intends to create the best, most efficient and most effective organization that they can, using the ISO 9001:2015 standard as a baseline, therefore the standard will be a core thread of the
