A prevalent point of view of the requirement ‘continual improvement’ which is listed in the contents of the ISO 9001 Standard (8.5.1) is that in some manner it is related to an actual improvement of a product or a service. A more attentive enquiry may find this to be a fairly obvious misinterpretation, as the document isn’t even a product or service specification, but a general system for regulating the quality of the product or service through what is produced. Title - - ISO9001:2000 Quality management systems - Requirements’. So, in so far as the Standard relates to the organisations’ output, it defines a control and assurance system that should provide a measure of conformance for the outgoing product. The improvement requirement refers to the manner in which this control is affected.
Herein lies the real problem with the ISO9000 series, as it has little to do with management in the normally accepted definition of that word, and certainly nothing to do with business management, which is about efficiency, effectiveness and costs. Pressured into an ISO9000 regime by (in the UK) a government sponsored initiative intended to improve the nation’s international image for quality, organisations large and small adopted the standard and registration in the belief that this alone would enhance their status in the market place. At the beginning this was true, but when competitors were similarly equipped with their registered status certificate, and none of them demonstrably better than the other, buyers returned to their original practice of buying against criteria that did not include ISO9000 registration. Clearly the Continuing Improvement aspect of the document was either a myth, wasn’t being implemented, or didn’t relate to what the customer wanted.
It seems apparent that if a product or service has reached a satisfactory standard of “quality” (whatever this may mean to the purchaser), any additional improvement - from the point of view of the purchaser, will be in the domains of cost and availability. These are not features that concern the ISO 9000 standards; however, they do impact on the customer’s perception of that product or service. It also follows that they would effect the task of the Sales and Marketing individuals who have the primary responsibility of convincing possible customers of the uniqueness and overall supremacy of their products. Here we find the Standard at its weakest and Continuing Improvement a sham.
If an organisation were to “take on board” a more dynamic approach to the management of the business, to the management of Quality if you like, and that approach specifically dealt with the cost of producing and distributing the organisations products or services, THAT would actually result in real improvement, and most likely continual improvement.
Why would this be different to the laboriously developed ISO9000 management system? For the simple reason that every top management team understands one language - money. A rationally constituted cost measurement scheme would include ‘error free’ cost estimates, plus actual measurement of costs incurred due to a failure to achieve the error free working. We call this the cost of non-conformance, or perhaps more acceptably ‘Transaction Costs’. If executive managers could be persuaded to abandon ISO9000 theory in favour of the collection of honest cost data such as this, business would - overnight, become more profitable because of the actions they would take - or have taken for them - to rectify the clear overspend found by this approach.
Generally this will not happen. Not due to any difficulty or inability to collect this data, but an inbuilt belief by virtually everyone not familiar with Eastern Cultures that error & failure is an inevitable consequence of human endeavour.
In the meantime, managers and their acolytes continue to hang onto the support strap ISO9000, firm in the belief that a documented system and its certificate will - as with the Wizard of Oz - be an adequate substitute for objective thought.
Ed. Bones is a chartered quality professional, an IRCA registered Lead Auditor, and is a senior partner with Meon Consulting Group, providing expert audit and consultant services for ISO9001 & ISO14001 management systems. The company web site provides detailed information, and includes the offer of FREE Advice.
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