Opus:
I spent a couple of months last year shepherding our company through the ISO9000 registration, so I can tell you bit about it. When I first confronted the ISO documentation I was hopelessly lost. Everything seemed so nebulous that it as like trying to grab smoke. Eventually I began to make sense of it.
In essence, you are correct. Any reasonably functioning company will already have much of the ISO practices in place. The point is to convince a regulatory party that this is the case. There are certain companies which will (for a fee, of course) come in to “audit” your company and agree that your practices meet the requirements set by the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) document outlining ISO9000. There are other companies that will coach you through the auditing process, nd sill others that will sellcourses, software, etc. to make the process easier. I sometimes seems as if the purpose of ISO9000 is to provide opportunities to let your company spend money on things it’s not clear that you need. But let’s not be cynical.
The point of ISO is to show that you have a clear procedure, can document the procedue, and can produce documents to show that you follow these procedures. You prodce a lot of paperwork in the couse of ISO certification, bcause this is the only vidence you have tha will convince your auditor that you are, in fact, doing what you say you are.
The fun part is that you get to say what your procedures are. The auditor doesn’t know your business, so YOU write the inspection procedures, manufacturing instructions, etc. YOU get to decide where and how yo store records on ever process. It’s a blank slate. Once you realize this, everything seems OK. After a while, though, you realze that you aren’t completely free. There are certain things that the auditor expects, and if you dn’t have outlined a procedure (backed up by documentation) you won’t pass inspection.
This probably sounds vague, still. But the est of the system is that you can trace your operations. If, three months from now, a customer discovers that a left-handed widget doesn’t work because part of it was assembled with a mis-calibrated tool, you are supposed to be able to track down the errant tool that caused the mess, and can locate the OTHER broken widgets that haven’t been reported yet, and can recall them.
To satisfy the auditor, you show them that you can produce such a paper trail – Customer Complaint Forms, Sales Records, Calibration Certificates, Purchase Orders, etc. You need a written procedure that tells how you deal with the Customer Complaint, and Procedures that tell how the Sales Recrds are written up, and how often you Calibrate your equipment, and Log Books that prove this. You have to perform “internal adits” on regular basis to show that your employees know an understand these rules, and to provide a way of self-correcting problems before the auditor shows up.
This is less complex than it sounds. The real challenge is in keeping the bureaucracy to a minimum – it’s easy to abuse the system an produce too much paperwork. That’s counterproductive. If you require too much, no one will fill it ut, so it won’t get done anyway. Do too little paperwork, and you won’t convince the Auditor that you’re adhering to the rules.
The payoff is that you can deal with any other SO certified company, and you don’t have to worry about the traceability of their material – after all, they’re keeping records, too.
Is it worth it? If other companies decide to only deal with other ISO certified cmpanies, this gives you an advantage over the competition. It’s an added expense, and you have to weigh the costs in time and money against what might be a market advantage. I’d rather spend my time doing other things personally. But it can be done without drowning in a swamp of paper and time-wasting procedures.
Oh, yeah – don’t read the chapter in Dilbert’s Guide to Business until you’ve passed your certification audit.