ISO 9001 sets out standards for a Quality Management System (QMS). Any business, whether big or small, can be certified to meet this standard. An ISO 9001 Accreditation ensures that you receive your certification to get a competitive edge in the market.
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Seven basic principles
These standards outline some basic principles that the organisation must meet to fit the criteria. It ensures that your customers are getting value for their money and the quality is consistent. These are:
Customer Focus
The primary focus for any business is to provide satisfactory goods and services to its customers and meet their expectations. This focus will help retain customers, build a good reputation and support an overall revenue increase.
Leadership
Effective leadership ensures that there’s a unity of principles and organisational objectives. Leaders also make sure that the actions conducted by your business are in sync with its principles.
Engagement of People
You need to have actively engaged and competent people at all levels within your organisation. If you have the right person at the right job and value your personnel, you will have a higher motivation in the organisation, that will result in improved performance.
Process Approach
Your QMS consists of interrelated processes that work in coordination to achieve the organisational objectives. It is crucial to identify the processes and effectively communicate with your team how they are related. You should also have a proper chain of command for the processes and a system of accountability for better management.
Improvement
You should focus on continuous improvement to maintain your performance and sustain competition in the market. For this, you need to provide your personnel with essential training from time to time. You must also regularly monitor and recognise any areas that need improvement.
Evidence-based Decision Making
While making important organisational decisions, you must have proper facts and figures to support any arguments that arise in the process. To ensure this, you should be able to gather accurate and relevant data and analyse it.
Relationship Management
It is always a good practice to maintain good relations with the parties such as suppliers and retailers. This practice will help you in having a consistent and quality flow of goods and services.
Auditing
You need to have auditing done to become registered to the ISO 9001 quality standards. There are two types of auditing:
- Internal auditing – this is done by the internal staff that is trained for this purpose.
- External auditing – this is carried out by a certification body.
Conclusion
An ISO 9001 Certification is very advantageous in adding value to your business. It can give you a competitive edge in the market and make sure that you abide by your business’s statutory requirements and regulations. This is also good for improving your revenues as certain businesses would require your organisation to be ISO 9001 certified before they associate with you.
There is a myth that this certification is required only for the manufacturing business, but in truth, ISO 9001 is for the businesses in any sector. Also, there is a common misconception that it requires a lot of paperwork. It requires paperwork, but to a limited extent, it also depends on your type of business. To sum up, applying for certification will bring a lot of benefits to your organisation and minimise the risks.
