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Certification to ISO 9001 has improved the financial performance of Certified Businesses. For an service organisation, the BSI calculator shows an average improvement profit of 10% per year for the first 3 years (based on an original 10% profit margin). For Return on Sales, academic studies suggest an average increase of 1.6 percentage points over three years.

For Return on Asset an average increase of 1.2 percentage points is suggested over the three year certification cycle. Both benefits and costs are estimates. The cost of ISO 9001 certification is estimated by using the organization’s number of employees, which provides the estimated duration for assessments that would be completed by BSI in three years.

These numbers were calculated by using the averages of 5 different academic studies that studied approximately 2500 companies in different industries and geographies. Also, BSI’s own research shows that 62% of BSI customers achieve cost savings as a result of being certified to ISO 9001.

Some of the research papers compared the performance of companies before and after ISO 9001 certification and others looked at pairs of similar companies that matched in terms of size and profitability and then at the relative performance following the certification of one but not the other. Financial performance was then compared using a number of metrics, most notably return on sales (RoS) and return on assets (RoA). The papers were written by independent academic institutions such as UCLA and Indiana State universities.

(References BSI, UCLA, Indiana State University as well as Journal of Business and Economic Research.)

Please contact Charter 4 for more details about ISO 9001 certification. We can then discuss your requirements.