3 Tips to Get Genuine Results from Your ISO 9001 Certification
ISO 9001 certification is regarded as a useful tool for businesses to gain success in their highly competitive industries. It helps them gain recognition, ensures their products or services quality-driven, wins tender or contracts, and ensures that all customers are satisfied with their product or service.
However, for many companies, questions like how to achieve ISO certification or how to realize the benefits of certification are quite confusing, and could cause them to avoid certification.
Well, the truth is there are many incredible benefits that come from ISO certification. A planned ISO certification process will help you realize the principles of the standard and its benefits to your business.
After discussing some apprehensions of business owners, we have come up with a few plain tips that will help to show how ISO standard implementation can bring genuine value to a business.
Keeping it Simple and Systematic
The process of ISO certification seems complex due to the amount of paperwork or documentation involved, the whole quality management system (QMS) implementation process, and the internal audit. With large-scale businesses, the certification process can become lengthier and more expensive. However, some misconceptions can hide the fact the certification process is a simple, quick, and systematic approach. Some think that all business processes need to be documented and adopted in the exact same way as other successfully certified businesses.
However, a business can follow a simple way to get certification. It can limit the needed documentation by focusing only on the quality requirements that are important for certification. Likewise, it can follow a unique and agile approach to implementing the QMS by seeking assistance from a professional ISO certification agency that can appoint their team of quality consultants to assess the processes and assure quality.
Focusing on the Business Value
The key purpose of getting ISO certified is to reinforce a strict management system in the business and to ensure quality assessment. The team which you assign for the implementation of the system needs to focus on the business value. They should be able to implement a QMS that reflects the best measures to evaluate the quality of the products, the intermediate materials used in their production, and the efficiency of the delivered services. The value to the business increases as a result of this because customers will start to buy more of your products or services and they are more satisfied, effectively raising your bottom-line. Companies that focus merely on QMS compliance and not on the results will fail to realize an increase in their business value.
To get the benefits of ISO 9001 certification, your company will need to focus on customers.
Do not Fake an Audit
Auditing is a crucial step in the certification process, as the reports issued by an auditor often determine whether the business gets certified or not. For this reason, many companies take cues from others that have passed the audit, and ensure the same requirements are enforced in their QMS. However, ISO 9001 is not a common script for quality management for businesses even though it is a general standard for quality assurance. Apart from the general compulsory requirements of the standard, you need to also know the additional requirements or processes needed to ensure quality management in your particular business.
Thus, whenever it is time for an external audit, don’t force the impression that your business has adopted or met all the requirements of the standard. Instead, ask the auditors whether the implementation of the QMS has been completed correctly, if there any problems or issues that need to be solved, what will better improve the quality of the QMS, or how you can reduce the time and resources invested in QMS processes. Good auditors will answer to your questions and prescribe measures that will make your QMS more effective.
Bottom Line
The summary of the article can be stated in one sentence, “When ISO 9001 certification is properly achieved, the benefits are bound to flow in.” These three simple ground rules not only help to make businesses journey to ISO certification successful, but they also help businesses add real value to their business by ensuring the effective implementation of the QMS. If you are among the businesses that are worried about the ISO certification process and do not know if it will be a constructive tool for your business, talk to our expert ISO consultants! With specialization in different ISO certifications, we can help you follow the right methodology to get your business certified and realize the genuine benefits of certification.