If you’re focusing on ISO 9001 purely as a quality system, you could be missing an important trick. That’s not to say you’re incorrect, but you may only be scratching the surface of its full potential. Drilling down into the various segments that form part of ISO 9001 reveals it can help your business make more money, too.
So – you have decided to implement an ISO management standard. Whether you’re implementing one of the popular standards such as ISO 9001 for quality management or a more specialist one like ISO 13485 dealing with medical devices you can rest assured that the benefits you’ll get will make it all worthwhile.
Quality assurance – it’s a phrase that tends to elicit groans from some, and it’s easy to see why. However, if you intend to develop a new product or service for your target audience, quality assurance or QA should be one of the most important elements of the development and production process that you consider.
Whichever management system or systems you are using in your organisation, you will only know how well they are operating if you conduct an internal audit of the systems to determine if they are being used efficiently and what benefits you get from operating them. The results of the audit will do one of two things:
Quality assurance or QA: It is a term most people have heard of, but few will have a concrete idea of what it means. Put simply, it is a method for preventing errors, defects, and other problems from cropping up in products and services. Good quality assurance procedures will help ensure the customer receives the exact product or service they want, and to make sure it is of high quality.
Can you turn customer complaints into positives for your business with a quality management system like ISO 9001? Consider this… if someone likes a product or service, they’ll usually tell a few people. If they don’t, or they receive poor service they’ll often tell a dozen or more people. Isn’t that the way it goes?
How can the quality management standard ISO 9001 help businesses build greater efficiencies in what they do? In today’s hectic world, working hard all day is often not enough to ensure your business is efficient. Being efficient means making the most of every moment of your time. Working hard is not the same as working smart.
In September 2015 a revised edition of the world’s most popular quality management systems standard ISO 9001 was published and is now titled ISO 9001:2015. In this short presentation we get an insight into the new standard from two experts who were both heavily involved in the update. Kevin McKinley, the acting ISO Secretary-General, and Nigel Croft, chair of the subcommittee that revised ISO 9001, discuss the new standard and the changes introduced.