Your ISO 9001 compliant quality management system is successful when your business profitably produces products and services that always meet the performance standards that your customers want
A ISO 9001 Quality System should set-up your business systems to continually achieve customer satisfaction.
Quality means meeting a standard. A quality product or service is one that has preset, measurable specifications for its performance and meets them. That is what a quality system strives to do—make a thing that meets the standards set for it.
Your business is successful when you gain and keep customers. That makes customer satisfaction a highly important quality that you want to develop and capture through your business activities. Your customers set the quality standards that you need to meet with your business.
Quality is a matter of customer perception; it has nothing to do with cost. A Rolls Royce car and a Mini Minor car are both quality products. Each car meets a preset quality criteria; it is built to deliver the specified performance necessary to meet its customers’ acceptance standards.
Unfortunately many companies set their own standards when they should be setting the standards that their customers want. That is what ISO 9001 Quality Management System Requirements asks you to address—use your customers’ standards for your own and design your business system to met them. When we help you build your ISO 9001 quality system that requirement is at the foremost of our endeavours.
ISO 9001 Quality therefore has two requirements: meeting set standards and delivering customer satisfaction.
To be really successful from an ISO 9001 quality point-of-view your product and service outputs must meet your customers’ minimum expectations. The job of our business when we establish your ISO 9001 system then becomes to help you to better those standards so that your customers are ecstatic with your product and service. When you do that cost effectively you create a highly profitable business with lots of happy customers doing repeat business.
This article explains the dangers of setting up an ISO 9001 certified quality system if you use the wrong approach; when we are your ISO 9001 consultant we make sure that this does not happen to you: Fixing the ISO 9001 Problem
With the business ISO 9001 quality system we develop for you we ensure that your business is correctly set-up to produce products and services that meet the standard you want for them. You create a truly successful quality system when your business processes always produce quality products and services that makes your customers so glad they willingly pay for them and return to you again and again.
The figure below shows what and ISO 9001 quality system aims to do for your business so that you reap the benefits from fewer errors and problems that ISO 9001 quality system brings to businesses. ISO 9001 quality management systems (QMS) are intended to reduce errors in your business so that you always make your products to a customer acceptable standard of quality every time.
Without a well functioning ISO 9001 quality system there are error rates of about 10 to 30 errors for every 100 opportunities for an error to be made. These are mostly unintended human errors. In a business without a real quality system you get a lot of problem products and rework because errors are not prevented from happening.
You will see in these businesses people whose job it is to fix mistakes. Naturally these people are always busy because the business system is always causing more mistakes. Obviously these company’s product costs are high because between 10 to 30 percent of jobs are done twice—once to make the items and a second time to fix them. Some of the jobs are even worked on three times to fix the fix that went wrong. Though by then the job is nearly as wasteful as if it were scrap.
Once you apply a ISO 9001 quality system properly you create standardisation and make it systematic. With a truly ‘living’ ISO 9001 quality system your error rates go down. A ‘living’ quality system is when you and your people are quality focused in all that you do. A good indicator of a ‘living’ quality system is the number of improvements you make in your operation. If quality is alive in your business there should be an average of one improvement a week per person in the operation. (By the way, one-improvement-per-person-per-week is a quality standard—it is a preset performance specification that you can measure to prove that ‘the standard is being met.)
We can take you much further than just an ISO 9001 quality system and will help you introduce statistical process control (SPC) into your quality system so that even fewer errors occur. If you take statistical process control quality throughout the company at all levels you become an accuracy controlled enterprise where error rates are driven down to amazingly low levels.
We are here to help you get to the level of quality performance that you want for your business. Contact Us at Lifetime Reliability Solutions and learn how to build a better quality management system than is possible with the ISO 9001 standard that makes your customers ecstatic and makes your business highly successful.
All the best to you,
Mike Sondalini
Managing Director
Lifetime Reliability Solutions HQ