I would appreciate input from anyone who has been involved with ISO certification as to whether or not such certification has benefited his or her business in terms of increased sales. If so, did the increase in sales justify the expense of acquiring certification? If not, were there any other benefits?
Thanks for any and all input.
I worked for a company that went through ISO 9000 certification. Basically we spent almost a year typing up procedure after procedure. We finally got it all done and the auditor came in. He spent a week reading and looking at our books and following orders through the system. We got certified and the books were never opened again. Nobody could stand the sight of them.
This is all my opinion of ISO so of course YMMV.
Benefits
1 It really made you think about how you do things at your company.
2 Some fairly beneficial ideas came up during the writing part due to #1 I would guess.
3 If our customers are ISO certified they will feel your pain and help out possibly building a better relationship.
Detractions
1 OMFG the paper work. We had to hire an extra person just to keep up with it.
2 ISO really has very little to do with actual quality. Do what you say. Say what you do. But ummm what if what you say is completely off base.
3 It never not even once got us a second look from a potential new customer.
4 And I can’t stress this enough. OH. MY. EFFING. GOD. THE PAPER WORK.
Grant, thanks for the response. That has been my experience–I’ve been involved with certification at three different companies and in fact I was hired only to write process documentation for all three. It makes you take a close look at your company, but has zero effect on sales. I had hoped someone would say that it benefited them, but it looks like a washout.
I have two beefs with ISO certification
First off I don’t need a written procedure to tell me how to do my job. I have been doing it for 12 years now. If I need a written procedure to tell me how to do it at this stage in my carrer, I should be fired, cause I am too stupid to hold this job.
However we do not have procedures for things that are not done on a regular basis. For instance if I wreck a company car, who do I notify? What forms do I fill out? We don’t have an ISO procedure for these things, and when needed they would help big time.
Secondly, the ISO processes are written on such a high level no one could use them to actually do the job being described.
Here is the ultimate ISO process
Whether it affects your business or not might depend largely on the nature of your business, too. When I worked for EWC, where we manufactured various types of small power and signal transformers, and other magnetic components, our clients were mainly military contractors and aerospace companies. As such, our company had to have the ISO 9000 certs (we were certified to ISO 9003) or we would have lost about 80% of our business. I was picked to go through the ISO Internal Auditor course (three days of boring hell, lucky me), and be one of our 2 internal auditors. If your potential customers require the ISO certs, it’s probably worth the effort, otherwise it’s probably a waste of time.
I was more or less reflecting on the amount of work I put into writing processes and came to believe it had all been a colosal waste of time. I just wanted to see how others felt about it.