To be truly competitive in a complex, challenging, and constantly evolving environment like today's, organizations must aim for lasting success. To do this best, it is necessary to:
- anticipate and/or identify the needs and expectations of customers and other interested parties;
- convert these needs and expectations (hypothesized or identified from customers) into products and services capable of satisfying all interested parties;
- attract customers to the organization;
- provide products and services that meet customer needs and the benefits expected from using that product or service;
- operate in such a way as to meet the needs of other interested parties.
Many organizations develop their own specific way of working and strive to satisfy customers in the best possible way. However, a Quality Management System certified to an international standard allows the organization to do all the things listed above in the best way and to demonstrate the technical capabilities achieved by the organization and by individual people.
Many non-certified companies, for example, develop good technical capabilities and are able to demonstrate them to customers, but do not focus enough on the capabilities of the people and, therefore, have to work hard to maintain a good standard of quality that tends to vary depending on the employee performing the work.
Trying to find a better solution, these organizations might try to design a system of processes, based on the body of knowledge typical of their management, and see if things improve (and they do improve when the system is well designed!). One of the available management models that combine proven principles and concepts that help grow an organization's capabilities is the ISO 9001 standard. It is not the only one, of course, but it is certainly one of the easiest to implement to start getting results in a short time.
The ISO 9001 standard was originally designed for business-to-business relationships, and it is, therefore, logical that it allows organizations that adopt it to increase customer confidence in their work. The advantages of ISO 9001 certification do not end here, however.
A well-designed and implemented system of processes allows you to learn from mistakes made and to treasure them so as not to repeat them in the future. Think about how a company that does not focus on quality might work: some defective products would be supplied and there would be neither an awareness of the mistakes made nor a precise willingness to improve. There could be several reworks with a consequent increase in costs and customer dissatisfaction.
Proper quality management, on the other hand, leads to products and services that are in line with customer requests, safe and reliable, as well as efficient and profitable companies. Adopting a structured quality system also leads to having a good decision-making process, which is, then, the key to business success.
The structured model of ISO 9001, in fact, provides management with all the information necessary to be able to make decisions based on facts and not, simply, on pure assumptions. A quality management system designed according to the requirements of ISO 9001, in fact, will have an integrated process for the collection and analysis of data, and through them the management will acquire information on which processes are working best and which, instead, need changes or improvements. All of this, of course, is of great support to the decision-making process.
A final advantage given by adopting a quality system in line with the ISO 9001 standard is that it lays the foundation for implementing other industry-specific standards in which the organization operates, such as ISO 14001 (which deals with environmental management), ISO 20000 (for IT service management), ISO 13485 (on medical devices), or ISO / TS 16949 (which concerns the automotive industry).
The implementation of ISO 9001, in fact, makes the addition of other management standards quite simple and quick, and this is particularly true if we consider the latest 2015 revision of ISO 9001 (and other ISO standards), since all new standards now use the same structure and the same numbering system.