The ISO 9001 certification is much more than a standard because it should be part of a company's strategic plan when management decides to adopt it.
A common mistake organizations make is viewing the ISO 9001 Certification standard merely as a tool to manage the quality of their products or services and obtain certification.
However, ISO 9001 is much more than that—if used correctly!
The principles of quality are simply good business practices, and it benefits every organization to adopt them and communicate this to their customers.
It is surprising that executives, entrepreneurs, and managers who aim to increase the efficiency of their organizations, customer satisfaction, and profitability often fail to leverage the real power of ISO 9001 as a strategic foundation for their business plans.
Some key benefits of a smart application of ISO 9001 include:
- A higher market survival rate;
- Increased sales;
- Reduction of waste and defects;
- Improved worker productivity;
- Greater attention to detail.
A business management tool like ISO 9001 should help organizations describe the logic behind how they create and deliver value for someone—whether it is a customer, an employee, the local community in which the company operates, or another stakeholder.
This framework should help define the company's mission, the necessary infrastructure, the reference organizational structure, the processes, and the operational procedures that will be used to achieve the objectives.
A good system model must deliver value to its customers, convince them to pay for this value, and operate in a way that translates into profitability.
It is essential to focus on what customers need and how your organization can meet those needs. If your company fails to implement ISO 9001 as part of its strategy, it will never realize the real value behind this standard.
Since ISO 9001 is designed to be used as a business management tool, every employee—so they can understand their role within the system—should have a basic knowledge of how the organization operates and, specifically, of how the process flow is structured within the company. Without this understanding, it is difficult to diagnose problems, identify their true causes, and implement effective corrective actions.
We hope that this brief overview has provided some insight into how ISO 9001 can be used as a true business management tool and how, when seen from this perspective, it is much more than just a quality management system.
Once ISO 9001 is implemented as a strategic decision of the organization and becomes part of the global business plan, it becomes easier to adopt a systematic method of monitoring and measuring processes to ensure that requirements are understood and met, ultimately adding real value to both the organization and its customers.
When processes are monitored through objective measurements, the company can systematically drive continuous improvement and growth by focusing on improving process performance—leading the organization to success.