Focused Quality Systems

When ISO Compliance works

Posted by Ed - 16/02/09 at 09:02 am

As a supplier quality auditor, I have been seeing a few small companies that claim to be ISO compliant vs. ISO certified.

Being ISO Compliant is the first step to being Certified. It means that those companies have a documented Quality System in place and they are following it according to the ISO 9000 requirements.   So when I audit them, I use the ISO 9000 based supplier checklist, review the objective evidence and verify that their quality system is functioning as required. The only box on the customer supplied checklist that I can’t check is the one where it asks  are they ISO certified.

In the early  90’s when ISO 9000 standards were released, there was initially a wait and see attitude because for large companies the costs and commitment were enormous. Then our customers started asking when we were going to get certified?

In my position as Manager of Corporate Quality Improvement, I could see it coming. Our customers would submit supplier questionnaires (two or three a week)  for us to complete.  Many  of them were almost  identical to what the ISO 9000 standard required.  So if we could see the benefit that if we were certified we would have to simply submit our certificate and we were done.

Shortly there after, I signed up ro be trained as  a Lead Auditor in Princeton New Jersey.

For big companies certification was a monstrous effort to train everyone. develop procedures, work through a quality committee, and get approvals on everything.  Internal audits had to be completes, corrective actions needed to be closed and much more.

In small companies the same thing happens but it is a little easier because the prime quality leader is usually the owner or president of the company and the number of people to train is usually a lot less.  So people get the message faster and know that the livelihood of their company depends on them doing a good job.  Because of this built in family-like environment, small companies can see that ISO compliance is simply documenting what they are already doing and ISO compliance just makes them better.

edb

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 9:04 am and is filed under ISO 9000. The entry is tagged under You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.