ISO 9001 is an important part of any company that wants to employ a quality management system and provide their clients and business partners with the best product possible. ISO 9001 has played a big part in the change of focus that happened over the last few years – more and more companies are now eager to get certified and prove that they actually do everything to provide highest quality possible in all their processes, which include production as well as documentation and general business approach. However, there’s a common misconception that those ISO 9001 rules are made for the big organisations only. What’s really required for a small company to get ISO 9001 certification and actually implement the norm?
The engagement of senior management
Previously, implementing ISO 9001 in a company was associated with having to deploy a separate group of people to take care of the process and ensure that everything went smoothly and was sustainable. However, ISO 9001 only now introduced the importance of senior management realising how important it is for them to actually meet the standards suggested by the norm and how internal and external challenges could affect the overall ability to meet the expectations of those who matter the most. This goes both to the clients and various parties of the production chain – if a company doesn’t want to comply to the standard, sooner or later they will begin to start losing their market position due to lack of proof for the quality they claim to have.
The ISO 9001 norm requires focusing on process management and investigating risks that are involved in them, which will then need to be reduced by implementing measures that will ensure effectiveness of all operations and keeping the quality at a solid level. This can do good not only from the consumer standpoint, but most of all for the company – integrating the management system with regular quality checks and complying to certain standards means better profits and company image.
Getting certified
Companies, regardless of their size and area of work need to comply to all the rules of ISO 9001 that are applicable to their processes in order to get certified. However, they don’t need to change anything drastically – the main idea of ISO is to implement the rules within the already existing quality management system and improving the overall performance of the company and all processes by carefully managing the risks and improving the methods of work.