Setting standards

Prior to getting into the heady world of magazine editing I had a career in quality assurance.

This kicked off with inspection and quality control roles within manufacturing environments and then progressed to quality engineering and management positions where I had my first encounters with quality systems.

Readers of a ‘certain’ age will remember BS 5750. Basically this was a standard that required companies to document everything they did in the form of procedures corresponding to respective clauses in a formal standard. The result was often procedures manuals the size of War and Peace, which although may have satisfied the whims of external auditors, actually did very little to improve the quality of anything. It was definitely possible to manufacture garbage – as long as you documented how you manufactured garbage.

To be fair to the committees formulating these standards, designing a one size fits all document was a nightmare. It wasn’t clear in the mid-1980s exactly what quality systems were supposed to do and in those days companies tended to have huge inspection departments to prevent nonconforming product from being shipped to the customer. Right first time wasn’t even thought of then; it was accepted that some scrap product was inevitable and the objective was to stop it going out of the door. In those days you achieved that by employing more inspectors rather than getting the job right at source.

The rest is history. BS 5750 evolved into ISO 9000 and became a prerequisite for gaining entry into supply chains everywhere. Today I would say that the vast majority of PES’ readers are accredited but these days the standard is much more about establishing sound business practices that deliver quality across the entire organisation rather than having a procedures manual that requires six grown men to lift.

And the purpose of this rambling prose folks – to advise that the new ISO 9001:2015 standard will be published in September with compliance required by 2018. So what can companies expect?

Well detailing the full requirements of the new version are totally beyond the scope of an editor’s comment but there will be more emphasis on business objectives and goal setting. Evidence suggests that quality standards offer much more value when they are aligned to the business strategies of an organisation and therefore the role of top management in their deployment is key.

I’ve always believed that properly implemented and embraced, ISO 9001 will really help any company achieve its objectives because essentially it contains sound business practices that are designed to provide the foundations for success, growth and most importantly, keeping customers happy.

I’ll leave you with this parting thought which is somewhat ironic when harking back to the old BS 5750 days. ISO 9001:2015 does not ask or require for ANY procedures, but what it does ask you to show is control. According to a BSI guidance document you need to demonstrate that you have identified areas key business areas and can control their respective outcomes. How you do that is up to you.

Here’s a link to a really useful document from BSI: http://bit.ly/1h7Zzk1