Why ISO 9001?
ISO 9001 is a well recognised mark of quality that assists companies in winning new business. The benefits of ISO 9001 certification are many and include:
- Improved customer satisfaction by providing a better quality product or service
- a common system with standard processes that is easy for your employees to understand
- improved efficiency resulting in reduced costs
- less errors and improved processes should you encounter an error
- improved reporting and management control
A well implemented Quality Management System will certainly enhance your business efficiency. The risk and process based system will allow you to easily identify where your procedures are failing. Each process will be defined with a required input and a desired output with checkpoints along the way with the goal of preventing bad outputs from “Process A” to incorrectly becoming the input for “Process B”. In essence, the early identification of a non conforming product or service will save your organisation both time and money – the time needed to re-run the job means the next money generating job is held back and money in terms of the extra and unplanned cost of raw materials and labour needed for the re-run and possible overtime costs.
ISO 9001 certification or compliance?
What is the difference between certification and compliance and which option is best for my company? The only difference between certification and compliance is the certificate and associated costs of certification. There is no set cost for certification as there are a number of factors that can affect the cost (e.g. type of industry, number of employees, number of sites, number of shifts).
But up to the point of certification, a well implemented ISO 9001 management system will be compliant and will have followed all the clauses and requirements of ISO 9001 standard: Context of the Organisation, Leadership, Planning, Support, Operations, Performance Evaluation and Improvement.
Why would I want to be certified?
There are a number of possible reasons for becoming certified, but typically many organisations are required by their existing or potential customers to be ISO 9001 certified. Other organisations just see the benefits of implementing ISO 9001 to have an efficient, process based system – whatever your reason may be and whether you want to be certified or compliant is entirely up to you.
If you need any questions, advice or assistance with your implementation, please contact Bawith SHEQ Services