Benefits of ISO 9001:2000

ISO 9001:2000 provides a model for quality management. It adds value to the
organization by means of following -

 Focus on meeting organization’s objectives.

 Improves organization’s ability to fully understand and meet customer requirements
in a consistent manner.
 Helps align all employees and processes to meet objectives.
 Improves bottom-line performance by enhancing revenue and reducing costs.
 A better understanding of what to do and how to do it.
 The ability to assure that work meets requirements.
 The ability to adjust processes when results are not meeting requirements.
 Focus on using facts and data rather than opinions.
 Enhanced communication throughout the organization (between management and
workers, between departments and with executives).
 Encourages clarity of responsibility and accountability.
 Standardizes the way things are done, reducing variability and making it easier to
solve problems.
 Fosters continual improvement as an institutionalized core value and provides a
platform for moving to performance excellence.

Principles and Key Concepts

Eight quality management principles have been used as a basis for the development of
ISO 9001:2000 in order to lead an organization towards improved performance –

1. Customer focus – Understanding current and future customer needs, meeting

customer requirements and striving to exceed customer expectations.
2. Leadership – Establishing unity of purpose and direction of the organization,
creating the internal environment in which people can become fully involved in
achieving the organization’s objectives.
3. Involvement of people – Enabling the abilities of personnel to be used for the
organization’s benefit.
4. Process approach – Managing activities and related resources as a process, thereby
achieving a desired result more efficiently.
5. System approach to management – Identifying, understanding and managing inter-
related processes as a system, contributing to the organization’s effectiveness and
efficiency in achieving its objectives.
6. Continual improvement – Continual improvement of the organization’s overall
performance to be a permanent objective of the organization.
7. Factual approach to decision making – Analysis of data and information resulting
in effective decisions.
8. Mutually beneficial supplier relationships – Enhancing the ability of both the
organization and its suppliers to create value.

CUSTOMERS – CUSTOMER FOCUS AND MEASURING SATISFACTION

The basic purpose of ISO 9001:2000 is to achieve customer satisfaction by meeting

customer requirements. While meeting requirements and preventing non-conformities has
been fundamental to ISO 9001, the new standard has enhanced emphasis on customers.
There are now key things an organization needs to understand and implement related to
customer focus –

 Top management is required to communicate to all in the organization the importance

of meeting customer requirements.
 Top management is now required to ensure that processes are in place to determine
and meet customer requirements, with an aim to enhance customer satisfaction.
 The Quality Policy is now required to contain a commitment to meet requirements.
This includes meeting customer requirements.
 The management representative is required to ensure promotion of awareness of
customer requirements.
 Customer feedback is now required as an input to the management review process
and improvement opportunities related to product that does not meet customer
requirements is a required management review output.
 Resources are required to enhance customer satisfaction by meeting customer
requirements.
 Customer requirements are the key input to product realization. Processes are
required to determine and review those customer requirements.
 Processes are required for communication with customers.
 Monitoring of information related to customer satisfaction is required.

PROCESS APPROACH – ACTIVITIES, PROCESS MANAGEMENT AND THE

SYSTEM APPROACH TO MANAGEMENT

The process approach involves managing the inter-related activities and associated
resources together to achieve a particular output. The system approach to management is
basic to ISO 9001:2000. It encourages the organization to link inputs to the system of
inter-related value-adding processes of the organization. This system of processes is
likewise linked to the outputs that go to customers. This approach has many advantages –

 It maintains focus on the creation of value by managing across the functional

departments of the organization, thereby reducing the number and severity of quality
problems that occur at department boundaries.
 It helps the organization focus on what is important to both customers and the
organization through measurement of product characteristics and performance of
processes.
 It encourages open communications – based on facts supported with data – between
internal customers, internal suppliers and between levels in the organization.
 It encourages continual improvement, since any gaps between customer requirements
and process performance are highlighted – quantitatively – and can be targeted for
improvement efforts.
 It directly supports the principles of ‘leadership’ and ‘involvement of people’ with
improvements involving everyone and every level of the organization.

TOP MANAGEMENT – RESPONSIBILITY AND INVOLVEMENT

ISO 9001:2000 emphasizes the role of top management. There are specific activities in
which top managers need to be involved. Top management is required to –

 Communicate the importance of meeting customer requirements.

 Create and maintain awareness of quality policy.
 Ensure that there are processes to determine and meet customer requirements.
 Establish measurable quality objectives at relevant levels in the organization.
 Ensure that the quality management system is planned so that it meets requirements
and the quality objectives.
 Conduct management reviews.

Top managers have a big role to play in ISO 9001:2000.

ALIGNMENT – QUALITY OBJECTIVES, PROCESS MEASUREMENT AND

COMUNICATIONS

ISO 9001:2000 requires that quality objectives be measurable and consistent with the
quality policy. It also requires that the measurable objectives be deployed. This ensures
that responsibility and authority for key dimensions of quality management system are
understood and deployed throughout the organization with the involvement of top
management. Measurable objectives ensure enhancement of improvement.

The processes of the organization need to be operated, monitored and measured with the
organization’s objectives in mind. Measuring the processes, where applicable, becomes
key to achieving the organization’s quality objectives.

Properly deployed objectives with aligned process measures are important.

Communicated is also needed to ensure that the organization’s people understand
requirements and receive input on the effectiveness of the system.

CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENT

ISO 9001:2000 has a clear requirement for continual improvement of quality

management system effectiveness. Improvement of system effectiveness is accomplished
by improving the processes of the system. The improvement system includes the
following at least –
 Setting a quality policy with a commitment to continual improvement of the
effectiveness of the quality management system.
 Establishing and deploying measurable objectives at the relevant levels and functions
of the organization. The objectives must be set with the commitment to improvement
in mind.
 Collecting data.
 Analyzing data.
 Conducting meaningful management reviews to track progress, identify improvement
opportunities, establish priorities and provide resources.
 Taking corrective action by eliminating the cause of non-conformities.
 Taking preventive action to prevent high-risk non-conformities or problems from ever
occurring.

The structure of the ISO 9001:2000 conforms to that of a typical process model and
bring together most of the original 20 element requirement structure of ISO
9000:1994 under 4 major focus areas:
Management responsibility (Clause 5)
Resource management (Clause 6)
Product realization (Clause7)
Measurement, analysis and improvement (Clause 8)

MANAGEMENT RESPONSIBILITY (CLAUSE 5)

One key criticism of ISO 9001's previous versions has been that management
had a minimal role that didn't require them to move beyond maintenance into the
improvement arena. In fact, the 1994 version of ISO 9001 is often viewed as a
foundation only and isn't considered a vehicle for moving a company to world-
class status.
ISO 9001:2000's Clause 5, Management Responsibility, is designed to transfer
the responsibility for the quality management system from quality assurance to
top management. This ensures that customer satisfaction is achieved, customer
requirements are fully understood and met, planning activities include objectives
at each relevant function and level within the organization, internal
communications are established, and information within the system (e.g.,
analyzing data, internal audit results, corrective and preventive action, customer
measures) is used to facilitate improvement.

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT (CLAUSE 6)

 Organization must determine and provide, in a timely manner, the resources
necessary to implement and improve the quality management system
processes and to address customer satisfaction.
 Organization must identify, provide and maintain facilities necessary to
achieve conformity of its products.

 Organization must identify and manage human and physical factors in relation
to the work environment.

 The requirement for organization to keep training records has been expanded
to include records of education, experience, training and qualifications.

 Employees must understand the relevance and importance of what they do

and how they contribute to the achievement of the quality objectives.

 Organization must evaluate the effectiveness of the training they provide.

PRODUCT REALISATION (CLAUSE 7)

Another criticism of ISO 9001:1994 was that it focused on the organization rather
than on the customer.
As per new standard, certain customer requirements must be determined, such
as specific product requirements, availability, delivery, support requirements, non
customer-specific product requirements, and regulatory and legal requirements.
Organization must now identify and implement communication "arrangements"
(methods) with its customers. The information between the organization and its
customers is related to products, enquiries, contracts, order handling, changes,
complaints and feedback.

MEASUREMENT, ANALYSIS AND IMPROVEMENT

(CLAUSE 7)
As with Clause 5, Management responsibility, management must play an active
role in Clause 8, which requires making decisions about key measures and
analyzing the results of information from sources such as audits, corrective and
preventive action, customer feedback and analysis of other information relating to
products, trends and suppliers performance.
Requirements within this section are customer satisfaction, analysis of data,
improvement, planning, internal audits, measuring and monitoring or processes
and products, control of non-conformity, corrective and preventive action.
The maturity of an organization's measurement systems will determine the
amount of effort and development required. If organization have measurements
in place, it will need to evaluate those measurements and the results they will
provide.
IMPLEMENTATION OF ISO 9001:2000 AT HAVELL’S
INDIA LIMITED, TILAK NAGAR

Implementation of ISO 9001:2000 requirements at HIL, Tilak Nagar has become

possible because we are already implementing world-class manufacturing practices
like 5S, Kaizen, Poka-Yoke, 3G, 3K, 3M, PFMEA, DWM, SPC, CIP etc. We have
formulated ‘Company Objectives’ and based on these objectives, 15 ‘Continuous
Improvement Projects’ have been launched comprising of Cross-functional teams to
achieve them.