Implementing ISO 9000

You may be in a position where your customers are demanding you implement an ISO 9000 quality system or you would like to do it for the benefits it can provide your organization. You may not have the resources to hire a consultant to help you. Can you achieve this task on your own, without the help of a consultant? Yes. You do not need a consultant to implement an ISO 9000 quality management system. You can do it with the resources you have.

Will a consultant provide you a better quality system than you can implement yourself? No. I say that not as a disrespect to consultants but because quality systems are ever evolving and developing. It's not where you start that is important it's where you end up in a year or two down the road. A consultant can expedite the process and save you a great deal of time. What takes you a day to do and figure out, a consultant can do in an hour or two. Based on this, why would anybody hire a consultant? The same reason some people hire someone to mow their yard and do their landscaping, that time is more valuable to be spent somewhere else.

You may be a position where ISO 9000 implementation is required but the necessary resources are not available to hire a consultant, what do you do? The first thing is to gain information. You need to become educated in the ISO 9000 standards and what they mean and their intent. Whether you hire a consultant or are choosing to implement a quality system on your own you need to purchase the following list of standards:

ISO 9000:2005 Quality management systems - Fundamentals and vocabulary

ISO 9001:2000 Quality management systems - Requirements

ISO 9004:2000 Quality management systems - Guidelines for performance improvements

ISO 19011:2002 Guidelines for quality and/or environmental management systems auditing

ISO 10014:2006 Quality management - Guidelines for realizing financial and economic benefits

You can obtain these standards from the International Organization of Standardization (ISO), American Society of Quality (ASQ) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

The most important piece of advice I can give you, once you have purchased these standards, READ THEM. Find yourself a quiet place and read them. Read them several times. The reading is dull and the wording is somewhat confusing, it's alright, read them. These are international standards, not a John Grisham novel. You are not going to be riveted to the reading and hardly waiting to get back to it. You may find yourself more confused after reading them, that is fine, keep reading. After a several readings, it will begin to make sense to you. You will gain a new understanding of what the standards are saying and begin to realize what needs to be done and how to do it.

At this point, you understand the standard and what needs to be done. If you ever question anything or are not quite sure, refer to the standard. Go back and read it again. The first thing you need to do is provide an overview for your top management. If cost constraints prevent you from hiring someone to train top management, then provide the training yourself. Chances are, your top management knows significantly less about ISO 9000 than you do. That makes you an expert and should you travel greater than 50 miles, you can begin to charge consultant fees.

Your training to top management should answer the following questions, what is ISO?, what is it going to do for us? why are we implementing it? how much is this going to cost us and how long will it take? how are we going to do it? what role does top management have?

What is ISO? ISO 9000 is an internationally recognized quality management systems standard. It's premise is based on knowing customer requirements and continually enhancing customer satisfaction. This is achieved by developing key business processes, monitoring them with metrics against objectives to ensure effectiveness and putting forth effort to continually improve those processes.

What is it going to do for us? The adoption of an ISO 9000 quality system allows us to consistently provides products and services to our customers that meet there expectations and continually enhance their satisfaction. Why are we implementing ISO 9000? Chances are it's one of two reasons, one is your customers are requesting it or two you are interested in achieving the results in can provide. How much will it cost and how long will it take? If you complete it internally you can plan on it taking about a year (depending on your size and available resources) and it won't cost you anything other than what you are currently paying people. You should plan on spending about $1,100 - $1,300 dollars for one person to go to internal auditor training. That person can then train the rest of your designated internal auditors.

The registration audit will be $5,000 - $6,000 and the surveillance audits run $3,000 per year. Approximately, it amounts to a one time cost of $9,000 and annual cost of $3,000. How are we going to do it? We will perform a gap analysis to determine our deficiencies and develop an implementation team from that. We will track the progress of implementation. What role does top management have in ISO 9000? Top management has the biggest role. That group is responsible for the planning, development, maintenance and improvement of the system. Top management is expected to be actively involved in reviewing the designated process metric data and making decisions based on that data.

After you train top management, you must assess where you are now. There are most likely processes in place that are being done even without documentation. Write down all of your key business processes, accounting, purchasing, human resources, customer service, etc. After you get them written down, now you need to flowchart them out to document how they work. A simple downward flowing flowchart in one column with responsibility in another column and the last column has records.

Once you get them documented, now go through the standard and write down any process, clause or section of the standard that your current process does not address. These are the gaps in your system. They are the areas the standard states needs to be addressed that you are not. Once you have this, put it into a document where you can track the action against who is responsible and time line agreed to. Similar to this:

Action Responsible Date Develop internal audit process Joe F. 11-14-06 Train internal auditors Tom C 12-18-06

After you have transferred the actions needed into the above format, you have developed your implementation plan. Ensure this plan is reviewed and monitored by top management frequently. They must be kept in the loop. At some point of the implementation you will want to train the entire workforce on ISO 9000. Work out a schedule that is flexible. It does not have to be extremely detailed, but provide a good overview of what ISO 9000 is, why it is being implemented and how it will impact them. Good luck, you can do it.

Robert Badner is a freelance writer for Innovations for Quality, LLC. Innovations for Quality provides live, interactive, online training for ISO 9000 and ASQ Certification. You can visit their websites at http://www.asqcertification.org and http://iso9000training.org