Advanced Systems Assurance

ISO 9001:2008 — Increasingly Relevant to All Sectors

ISO 9001:2008 sets the standard today for an organisation's internal "quality management". The aim is to ensure that an organisation’s products or services are produced or delivered in accordance with the customer’s expectations through adherence to suitable processes and regulations.

In November 2008 the standard was amended from ISO 9001:2000 and, by the end of 2010, all certifications and re-certifications will be to ISO 9001:2008. In the meantime, there will be a transitional period.

ISO 9001:2008 certification is one of the best ways for an organisation to provide its customers with confidence and reassurance in their products or services. The standard applies across all markets for organisations of any size or type and enables continuous competitive improvement to safeguard the organisation’s future.

What Can ISO 9001:2008 Do for You?

• In both the private and public sectors, ISO 9001 certification can help raise customer satisfaction and reduce complaints; improve internal working processes; improve or maintain your internal and external reputation; help secure favourable publicity; and make it easier for employees to perform well.
• In the private sector, ISO 9001 certification can help achieve new marketing opportunities, increased sales, profits and efficiency, reduced costs and a much more competitive organisation.
• A key benefit of ISO 9001 certification for a private sector business is that it helps you win work. You will be more likely to pass through the screening process of any tendering exercise if you are ISO 9001 certified and can assure your potential customer that you operate a satisfactory quality management system. Without this, you may not even be invited to tender or may have your bids rejected straight away.
• For public sector bodies, ISO 9001:2008 can help to create a more robust service and align the organisation more with the private sector and a more commercial approach. An increasing number of public authorities are achieving ISO 9001:2008 to help with:
  
  
  • benchmarking exercises;
  • consistency of quality across all service areas;
  • auditing processes;
  • applications for funding purposes;
  • achievement of other awards;
  • avoidance of serious lapses in procedures;
  • enhancement of internal and external image;
  • positioning, in terms of central government initiatives.

What About Other Management Standards?

• ISO 9001 is compatible with other standards having similar features that can be combined to produce an integrated system tailored to the needs of your organisation.
• These standards include:
  
  
  • ISO 14001 (Environmental management).
  • OHSAS 18001 (Health & Safety management).
  • Investors in People (IiP).
  • ISO 27001 (Information Security).
  • BS25999-1 (Business Continuity).
  • BS8900 (Managing Sustainable Development) and
  • The draft BS31100 standard (Code of Practice for Risk Management).

How We Can Help You Achieve ISO 9001:2008

Step 1

To start with, we will appoint a consultant to match you, your organisation and its marketplace. We will also agree with you a fixed cost and time-plan for the work. Your consultant will support you throughout the entire process up to ISO 9001 certification - and beyond if you wish.

Step 2

We will then hold a brief meeting with you and your key people to discuss your specific needs and agree the detailed programme of work.

Step 3

If it suits your needs we can run a programme of one hour workshops for all your staff so that they understand and become engaged in supporting the programme.

Step 4

Your consultant will then work with you to identify and review your key processes in action and compare them with the requirements of ISO 9001. This provides a clear indication of which processes fit well with the standard, which will need documenting and which will need amending.

Step 5

All the required documentation to match your organisation’s needs with the standard will then be produced by the consultant. This will include a quality manual and details of all the procedures, forms, checklists and data. It is important to emphasise that this will be unique to suit your organisation’s specific operating realities, making the system as ‘future-proof’ as possible.

Step 6

The consultant will then review the overall system with you and your key people to ensure that it does meet your needs. Once all has been agreed, a date will then be set to make the new system ‘go live’.

Step 7

You and your people will then work to the new system for a suitable period of time which enables the new way of working to become embedded. This is typically from 6 to 12 weeks but it can be done sooner in some cases. During this time your consultant will help you select an accredited certification body to carry out the eventual assessment.

Step 8

On an agreed date your consultant will visit your organisation to carry out a dummy assessment. This is invaluable to all concerned and provides us all with a measure of whether the system is real and alive, understood and accepted by all as well as being robust and professional.

Step 9

Having selected a suitable accredited assessment body your consultant will then shadow the assessor if you wish on the day of the assessment. Once your registration has been recommended, your organisation can be registered and certified as officially conforming to the ISO 9001:2000 standard and you will receive a certificate.

Step 10

If you wish, your consultant can help you gain maximum marketing benefit and help maintain your now certified quality system going forward. This can include carrying out internal audits, overseeing management reviews and generally ensure that your system is up to date and working well for you and your people.

Achieving Two or More Management Standards for Your Organisation

We can also help your organisation achieve or maintain a certified quality system in conjunction with another management system, for example, ISO 9001:2008 in conjunction with ISO 14001, the environmental management system. This would:

• Help minimise the effort that your people would have to make to achieve a second management system, and also ...
• Allow us to be better placed to offer our services at more beneficial fee rates to you.

The 2008 amendments to ISO 9001 have helped to align it with ISO 14001.

Our Consultants and Experience

Over the past 20 years, we have assisted hundreds of clients to achieve certification to many standards. This experience has provided us with the opportunity to develop a simple, straightforward and highly effective approach which brings unique client benefits. We always have and always will, seek to provide value added management systems.

We have a strong team of qualified and experienced standards consultants and they go to considerable effort to involve and capture the interest of staff throughout an organisation so that tangible benefits are realised by clients from improved ways of working in addition to achieving certification.

How we work to help you includes:

1. Keeping disruption to the working day to a minimum.
2. Developing a system that flows around the processes and captures the requirements of the relevant standard.
3. Developing procedures, and/or flow diagrams if they suit you, ideally no longer than one side of A4; making those procedures work by extracting them from the manual and displaying them in the key areas, including your intranet, making them understandable to staff.

The ISO 9001:2008 Guidance and the Standard Explained in More Detail

The requirement for suppliers to work according to approved procedures was initiated many years ago by the Ministry of Defence in the UK. This concept gradually evolved throughout the 1960s until the British Standards Institute (BSI) published a standard for quality assurance for the electronics industry. A new emphasis was placed on suppliers proving that they could meet a national independent standard rather than customers having to check that they would receive what they expected.

In 1979, BSI produced the common standard BS 5750 and persuaded the various industry sectors to stop using separate standards. Under BS5750, all sectors could demonstrate that their production processes were controlled in accordance with published processes.

Since the 1980s, the standard has undergone a number of revisions, has been adopted by the International Standards Organisation and become recognised throughout the world. Following amendments published in November 2008, it is now officially known as ISO 9001:2008, focusing on continuous improvement, customer satisfaction and better alignment with the Environmental Management standard, ISO 14001.

The eight key principles introduced by the latest edition of the standard are:

1. Customer focus.
2. Leadership.
3. The involvement of people.
4. Process approach.
5. A system approach to management.
6. Continual improvement.
7. A factual decision making approach.
8. A supplier relationship that is mutually beneficial.

For More Information ...

• Please contact: Phil Austin, Touchstone Renard Limited, 11-15 Betterton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9BP, United Kingdom.
• Tel: +44 (0)20 7866 8123.
• Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .