As you all know, ISO certified organizations need to have surveillance audits at least annually to keep their certificate valid. Covid has made face-to-face encounters very dangerous, but the audits must be done to keep supplier organizations’ certificates valid. These audits will now have to be performed virtually until health risks start to decline. This …
Now that you’re getting ready for Virtual Audits, it’s time to look into the ‘Cost of Quality’ concept. All the ideas apply to Environmental, Health and Safety and all other management systems. How are we making sure our systems are giving us value? What kind of resource allocation should we make to this activity? To …
Ever since the first non-conformance was written, we’ve been looking for ways to find the cause, do a corrective action and bid farewell to the profit sucking problem. It’s been a problem closing out non-conformances since I’ve been associated with ISO – 1992. All the studies of ‘Top non-conformances’ from Registrars showed closeouts as the …
Why Do A Root Cause Analysis – What’s In It For Me? Read More »
Any worthwhile Standard starts with a set of ‘Principles’. ISO 31000 is no exception. Let’s see if we can tie these Risk Principles into a typical ISO Management System. Value Creation and Protection is at the core of this section of ISO 31000 and gives it relevance to any business. Without ‘structured risk management’ an …
ISO 10004 has some fine ideas to get your customer satisfaction activities organized. As we’re bombarded more and more with surveys, suffering from survey fatigue to the point where we’re saying ‘Why bother?’ we still need to get some information to continue our improvement journey. The conceptual framework looks like this: It’s the Input -> …
This is the ‘Rubber Hits the Road’ clause, especially for ISO 9001. The EMS and OHS standards both include the ‘Emergency and Preparedness’ in this section – Operations. By using a flowchart to illustrate your workflow you’ll be able to meet the requirements of 4.4.1 a) and b) – show what the processes are, inputs …
Clause 6.2 requires that we set measurable objectives. This helps motivate people – just strap a FitBit to someone’s wrist and watch what happens! Try SMART targets to make things clear to your folks: Specific Measurable Attainable (or Action-oriented) Relevant Time Limited Next, don’t set your targets until you know what your processes are capable …
The last two posts got us on the road to ‘understanding customers better’. By the time we’ve gathered information on our customers’ perceptions of how well we met their expectations, we could be lost in the weeds. ISO 10004 has some more guidelines on what to do next in Clauses 7.4 and 7.5… 1. Analyze …
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 …
