5 Steps to ISO 9001 Certification Implementation

5 steps to begin ISO 9001 and the implementation of a quality management system, what we're here to do in this article is talk about the basic steps to understand

what's involved in ISO 9001, what it's all about and I'll give you 5 tips to follow that sets you off on your journey to compliance with the ISO 9001 or meeting ISO 9001 and supporting your organization with improving customer service. You're challenged with understanding this complicated standard, you're challenged with trying to understand what I need to do and you just want some simple terminology, you just want it simply broken down into five basic steps to follow to get your quality management system started. Let's get into this step

step 1 is really important I'm not going to much around, we'll just go through the 5 steps and I'll give it to you straight.

Okay so step 1 what are the promises that your organization's making to your customers. Specific to your customers, not what's on your website not the features  , not the bullet points not that stuff but when the team that do the selling in your organization or the people that do the selling or marketing and selling in your organization, when they do that, what do they promise customers.

 A good little example that you can undertake is to pick a specific customer, identify that specific customer and say

·       what did we promise them,

·       what price did we promise them,

·       when did we promise the product or service to them,

·       what was it about the product or service,

·       its specifications,

·       its sizes,

What was promised to them, and so once we've got that in our clear awareness we can move through the next or the rest of the steps in this process pretty easily and simply.

Ok moving into step 2 what do you do or what do you clearly understand that you do to deliver those promises and this is often where the big breakdown is, the sales and business development teams are out selling and they're doing their marketing and sales for the marketplace and promising to customers, but internally in the organization we get all caught up in  , we're not clearly understanding we need to do these three steps to deliver that part of the promise to the customer and that's where it falls down.

The quality management system or the defined processes that the standard starts to talk about, the critical processes it's starting to about very clearly, we do these three steps to deliver that on time, we do these three steps to deliver that specific product or that specific service and so starting to clearly write down on note down and or clear up in your own mind, as you're challenged to understand the complexity of organization, start to ask the question of your organization,

·       what do we do to ensure that that's delivered on time,

·       what do we do to ensure that this is the exact service that we provide,

·        what do we do to ensure that the customers happy at the end of the process, that the customers satisfied, that they paid you the money and they got this product or service that they paid for.

So it's really clear to just get a understanding of what those things are and focus on those things.

step 3 is all about setting up a dashboard and tracking your performance, how we're going,

·      how many customers did we not deliver on time,

·      how many customers did we deliver on time.

This is starting to give you a dashboard or a scoreboard if you like across the organization and identify how you're going. You know we're not going well in this area, we're going well in this area and we can start to balance around, but that's ultimately tracking of objectives and targets.

Well the objective and target is to achieve customer satisfaction

·       deliver on time

·       on budget,

·       on specification

if you like depending on what the product or service is and the monitoring and measurement systems don't really go into depth and give a clear picture of the organization's performance and that's why we talk so much here at Best Practice about all the graphs and statistics or even our logo if you like it's a graph performance over time so we want to see and help you with your performance over time so now is the time to start to say what can we measure our track internally to give us some lead indicators to ensure that we meet and deliver on the promise. What do we need, to watch what do we need to measure,

 so that

 we can check and

we can monitor and

measure and

manage

the organization to deliver

what we promise,

we need to deliver

what we promised, how are we going, can we improve that. Okay step 4 is writing a list of the things that need fixing and the new standards you know they're getting complicated they're talking about risk based thinking, what we're recommending here at Best Practice to give you a start as a beginner and someone who's struggling to understand the standards, is to do a SWOT analysis.

SWOT analysis

Look at strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. One of the critical reasons for recommending a SWOT analysis is that there will be people already in the organization in their own careers whether, it's the marketing people, the finance people, the executive management in the organization, that have participated in SWOT analysis as before and so because they have we don't need to train them in a new skill we can say hey we're looking at the organization let's do a SWOT analysis and let's start to write ourselves a list of the things that need fixing. So in the previous step we talked about a scoreboard and dashboard, now we're talking about a SWOT analysis between those two things we're saying write a list and then start to prioritize that list,

·       what are the most important things that we need to fix,

·        what are the easy things that we can fix to improve our customer satisfaction and improve our organization as a whole.

Now the last part of prioritizing that list is it's important to identify follow-up, so part of this step is about follow-up, we've written the list we'd go to the organization we say this has got to be improved then following up, how's that going, has it been improved, has it been finished or execute and the most important part there is executed. Lots of people out there writing lists and doing risk registers and all that sort of stuff but following up to ensure those actions that have been identified are closed out that they're implemented that it's been executed is a critical part here. Ok let's do is just a quick recap; so with step 1 we're talking about getting your managers together, getting key people together, and identifying and writing down the list of specific promises that you make to your customers. Be very clear, capture the list of the promises the times, the dates, the specifications, what are the promises and write those things down that you make to your customers.

As part of step 2 what we want you to do here is understand and write down or identify the critical processes and they could be a really basic one-page flowchart, the critical processes or the steps that you follow to deliver each of those promises. So what other things that need to be done and capturing notes and we talked about in the standard defining critical processes on mapping critical processes, don't write policies and procedures but capture. As part of step 3, 5 graphs or 8 graphs per team in your organization that are good examples of the things that need to be monitored and measured, the performance that needs to be tracked, to show that each of those processes is working, or each of those promises is being delivered, and what you can see here at Best Practice is we've got 30 graphs that are divided across five teams that track our performance that gives us a clearer picture of when we're going well and when we're not going very well and we can jump on those things and look at what's broken in our process.

As step four you're going to end up with a list, a to-do list and if you can order that to-do list so the most important things get worked on first,

step 5 is all about prioritization so putting the important things at the top and the least important things at the bottom and more importantly following up,

 setting up a system to follow up with

each of the managers and

each of the executive and

each of the participants

 in the organization to ensure that the improvements are being executed, implemented and they're staying in place in your organization so they continue to support the improvement of performance and ultimately the delivery of those amazing promises you're making to your amazing customers.

So what you're going to have, what this looks like people in your organization clearly understanding and communicating across all teams and each team's going to have an understanding of the things they need to do to deliver those processes, you're going to have a way of tracking your performance and showing when you're going well and helping you to identify areas that might need improvement, you're going to have a SWOT analysis and

the SWOT analysis is going to create a to-do list, the to-do list is going to be ordered and so you'll have an opportunity to be constantly following up to closeout actions that are going to help your organization to keep improving into the future.

So that's been our 5 steps on how to improve your organization how to start ISO 9001 so

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we've got a free checklist that helps you start with ISO 9001 available over on our training academy into the comments below and you'll see the link to the checklist the link to our training academy and that's going to help you go through and understand more detail about ISO 9001 so your organization's profitable efficient fun and delivers amazing services to your customers.