I’ve been a big fan of Edward de Bono for about 30 years. Over that period of time he has given us hundreds of ideas about Creative Thinking. In fact, if you’ve ever heard the term ‘lateral thinking’, according to Wikipedia, “The term was coined in 1967 by Edward de Bono”. In my role as …
Clause 9 requires that we monitor and measure the effectiveness of our management systems. For many, this becomes a chore with little or no valuable information to show for all their work. So if we’re measuring, let’s make sure it’s giving us great info and helping us determine if our system is working. John Seddon …
Tackling Clause 6.1 in ISO 9001 can be structured by using Ishikawa’s fishbone diagram. You can ‘reverse engineer’ it to create a framework for a simple risk approach. Ishikawa discovered that most non-conformances typically have their ‘root cause’ in one or more of these four areas: People (he called this category Man). This relates to clause …
The challenge of determining Customer Satisfaction continues. With all the available technology, we haven’t made much headway, really. Requirements = Needs + Expectations Needs are outlined in the ‘contract’ with your clients, and determined in Clause 8.2. But what about ‘expectations’? These are hard to nail down, but at the very least, make sure you’re …
Without doubt, our customers need to be the focus of our efforts. You’ll find that the word ‘customer’ appears 88 times in ISO 9001:2015. Some of the places it appears are in the ‘General’ section, Quality Management Principles, the Process Approach, Scope, and these clauses: 4.2 Needs and Expectations of Interested Parties; 4.3 Scope; 5.1.2 …
For years we’ve had to demonstrate that we’ve improved the effectiveness of our management systems. It’s a great money-maker for the Private Sector and improving a management system helps the Public Sector work within their budgets. Easy words to say; hard to implement without some effort. Here’s a way to structure your strategy to systematically …
Since the 1987 version of ISO 9001 was released, we’ve been hearing organizations groan about being ISO Registered or Certified. Here are some ideas to get value out of your system. #1 Make Internal Audits pay dividends by hunting for Opportunities for Improvement instead of just looking for conformance to procedures. Poorly written procedure? Poor …
John Seddon has been a Systems builder since the 80s. He bases his work on the genius of Taiichi Ohno – The Toyota Production System – Beyond Large-Scale Production. Seddon has been successful adapting Ohno’s TPS approach but using it in services. There’s always a temptation to set targets and try to convince people to …
Not everyone LOVES doing corrective actions, and that’s an understatement! So why bother? Here are a few good reasons to carry out corrective actions: Corrective actions are one of the building blocks to system improvement. System improvement is required in 11 places in ISO 9001:2015 4.4.1 – Context, QMS requirements: continually improve a quality management …
You bet we can!! When we integrate 2 or more Standards, the time savings start immediately! It takes some work to combine some of the requirements, but the benefits last for the life of the system. Top Management Benefits Management can literally kill multiple birds with one stone. As we go down the list of …
