ISO 9001 - Clarifying Your Best Practice

Every organisation should define it's best practice, meet its legal and customer requirements consistently to survive. Hopefully, good management and appropriate decisions will also lead it to flourish long-term. ISO 9001 significantly assists this by

• Clarifying and communicating organisational goals, targets and commitments.
• Establishing clear leadership roles, reporting lines and responsibilities.
• Agree and document your best practice. Clear ordered and documented processes and procedures implemented by competent personnel.
• Ensures relevant, current information availability to the right people.
• Establish data and monitoring systems for good record keeping and fact-based decision making.
• Monitoring operations against the organisations targets and aims.
  Identifying issues and implementing improvements.
• Updating systems, procedures and documentation to ensure improvements become the new baseline.
• Ensure training is carried out at all levels of the organisation.
• Externally checked by assessor from a certification body like BSI or NQA or TUV.

How does ISO 9001 achieve these things? The ISO Standard provides the requirements for establishing them. As an improving organisation, it is your responsibility to find ways to meet the requirements. Then to document how you are going to do it. Ultimately, the organisation will implement your documented systems and start to meet the requirement of ISO 9001 in practice.

Auditing Helps You Improve

As your new system develops you will need to audit it. Traditionally managers look for problems and try and solve them. The ISO 9001 Standard changes that slightly. Instead, your systems are audited by staff who are trained for auditing. They look at your operations, documented procedures and processes. If there is any disparity between them, then the auditor requires appropriate adjustments to the non-conforming part of the system, so they align.  The aim is to ensure those systems work together to do what they are supposed to do and comply to the requirements of ISO 9001 itself. So, the audits help achieve that by pointing out problems and implementing corrective actions. Actually, it also frees up a lot of management time. A big bonus, leaving managers more time to make strategic decisions.

The ISO 9001 Standard provides a launchpad for success. 

At Charter 4,  we have long experience of assisting organisations in many different industries to achieve ISO 9001. We have concentrated our efforts on helping businesses of all sizes on achieving two outcomes.

• First, we want your business to achieve certification.
• Second, we have established techniques and methods for taking your business beyond just complying. We want your business to develop and improve. Our experience has shown that success comes to those companies which use ISO 9001 to, “Improve your business, rather than just comply”.

We will ensure that your ISO 9001 experience will avoid, just ticking boxes. If you would like to genuinely take your business to the next level, we would like to hear more about how we can help. Please contact us.