ISO is a proactive (not reactive) way of managing quality?

By: Nitin Hiranandani

The Quality Gurus have defined or have various ways of looking at quality.

Dr Edward Deming helped to focus the responsibility of quality on management and popularized the
PDCA cycle, which led to it being referred to as the “Deming Cycle”.

Quality is what satisfies Customer requirements.

Quality management is the act of overseeing all activities and tasks that must be accomplished to
maintain a desired level of excellence. This includes the determination of a quality policy, creating
and implementing quality planning and assurance, quality control, quality improvement.

Let’s understand what is reactive way of Quality Management:

Reactive way of managing quality is as name suggests take action on what has already happened
wrong with quality. There is no appropriate arrangement on how to correct it, who will do
correction, what will be consequences etc. There is no alternative left other than just correcting
what has gone wrong.

On other hand Proactive way of managing quality is futuristic thinking in what can go wrong, who
will be responsible, what impact it can have on system. When one thinks about all these factors then
very well one can prepare for not allowing that to happen and take precautionary actions.

The question here is can all that can go wrong can be prevented. Is it possible that any one approach
organization can have to manage quality reactively or proactively? Probably no as all the quality
issues may not be predicted. But it is advantageous to have more of proactive approach than
reactive.

ISO is a proactive (not reactive) way of managing quality?

ISO has developed and published more than 24000 standards as of now.

Organization wishes to adopt ISO for quality management, then some sector specific quality and
quality management system standards have been published by ISO. There is ISO 9000 series of
standards.

History of standards related to quality management is way back to 1959 when United State
Department of Defense MIL-Q-9858 standard was published followed it up by revised MIL-Q-9858 in
to NATO AQAP series of standards in 1969.

In 1974 BSI published the BS 5179 series of guidance standards followed it by BS 5750 series of
standards and submitted to ISO.

ISO published the ISO 9000 standard in 1987 first time. Followed it up in year 2000, 2008.

All these standards supported indirectly proactive way of managing quality specifically following Dr
Edward Deming PDCA approach for continual improvement.

The standards were published on the basis of 8 Quality Management Principles- Customer Focus,
Leadership, People Involvement, Process Approach, System Approach, Improvement, Factual
decision making and Supplier relationship management.
Then came current ISO 9001:2015 which certainly helps in Proactive way of managing quality.

The 8 Quality Management Principles were decreased to 7 by clubbing of System approach with
Process approach and renaming Involvement of people to Engagement of people, Factual decision
making to Evidenced based decision making, and Supplier relationship to Relationship Management.

The clauses were brought to Annex XL which is 10 clause structure for Management System
Standard. The clause Context of Organization was never ever in any of the ISO standard until year
2015 when 2 standards, ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001:2015 were published. Risk Based Thinking was
incorporated as addressing Risk and Opportunity.

Both these clauses supported the 7 Quality Management Principles and made standard proactive.
Now first organization needs to understand themselves first in terms of Internal and External issues,
interested parties to have great relationship management with each interested party. Considering
what can go wrong with each process and their interaction, in terms of risks and convert them in to
opportunity at planning stage of PDCA segment of Dr Edward Deming philosophy of Quality.

Implement what has been planned in Do segment of PDCA, Performance evaluation as Check
segment of PDCA and finally Improvement as Act segment of PDCA. Most importunately in Act
segment if you face any non-conformity then do corrective action. The preventive action is no more
needed as it is Risk Based Thinking (RBT) where all that can go wrong were taken care to address
Risk and Opportunity. What organization needs to do is to take any non-Conformity as lesson
learned and revise the Risk and Opportunity analysis taking in to account what went wrong and do
not allow that to happen.

Hence, we can say ISO is helping in managing quality in Proactive way rather than reactive way of
managing quality.