Grow Your Business by Achieving ISO9001

How Can You Get the Most from Your ISO9001:2008 Certification?

Among the most popular misunderstandings of the ISO9001 certification is that its generally an exercise in putting documents together to show an auditor to be able to get the certification. Based on those who have worked with ISO for many years, the ISO standard before concentrated less on the results and required too much documentation. So don't blame the numerous business owners and managers for believing that this was merely an added cost and was not helpful to their business at all.

These days, improving business processes and not putting together documentation for the auditor is the focus of the revised ISO standard. Shareholders, workers, customers and even top management of certified businesses see the positive impact of their achievements. Now, both the customer and business requirements of a business are being improved with this new "Process Approach".

Through working with a lot of businesses each year in achieving ISO9001 certification since the year 2000, our consultants have developed three basic rules for implementing ISO in order to attain meaningful, measurable results from the investment:

The most common "mistake" we've seen businesses make in implementing ISO for the initial time is to make it very complex. Job training, procedures and records no one would look at can be the result of this error. ISO9001 for Small Business The reason behind this is commonly because of the implementers of the system taking a "better to be safe than sorry" approach since they don't really understand what the auditors would look for during the audit. Besides not adding to the value of the business, this would also increase the present ISO certification expense.

Thus, try to limit the documentation and concentrate more on implementing those business requirements and what is required by the standard.

If you want to improve performance for both the client and the business, you must improve on the procedures of the company and this is the second guideline. Thus, you must implement everything to support the requirements of the customers and according to the company's operations. Because of the general language in the ISO standard, businesses can specifically modify their QMS to meet their unique requirements while still complying with the intention of the certification.

The general rule-of-thumb is to work with a specific requirement until you can see how it helps your business and fits with the management approach of your organization.

Do not implement something for the reason of merely showing it to the auditor and this is the third guideline. While discussing an ISO requirement, if you say that you are implementing something so that you can show the auditor then apply rules one and two. In order to meet ISO requirement, a flexible system must be developed and implemented to suit and add value to your business. Make sure that your ISO procedures and documentation are simple enough to add value to your business. Doing the abovementioned guideline would certainly please your auditor.