Therefore the policy must:

• Be appropriate to the purpose of the organization,
• Include a commitment to comply with requirements and continually improve the effectiveness of the quality management system,
• Provide a framework for establishing and reviewing quality objectives,
• Be is communicated and understood within the organization, and
• Be reviewed for continuing suitability.

Why write a quality policy? It can formally demonstrate the organisation’s commitment to comply with legislation, international standards, and meeting customer requirements. It sets a benchmark for the organisation so that it can measure its own performance. If such commitments are informal, then the organisation as well as the senior management cannot be held to account! So what your policy say about you?

It should be emphasised that the requirement in ISO 9001 is for continual improvement of the effectiveness of the QMS.
Continual improvement emanates from the objectives set by top management, which should (at least) address: the improvement of internal efficiency (for the organization to remain economically competitive), individual customer needs, and the level of performance that the market normally expects.
For example, in the aeronautical sector, the “acceptable rate” of non-conforming delivered product is zero percent, so it would not be useful for the organization to set objectives for an “improvement” in this rate. However, it would be useful for the organization to have objectives aimed in improving its internal efficiency and its competitiveness (e.g. through innovation).
The company should seek to  set objectives that establish the correlation between the 3 factors of: corporate objectives, customer needs, and market expectations. Thereafter, it is up to the organization to balance the need for improving internal efficiency and the need to progress with external performance (although the two are very often closely related). No one in isolation can ever be considered as being “enough” or “not enough”.

What a reasonable market benchmark ?.

Continuing the above aeronautical example, if the organization announced that it had improved from a level of 50% non-conforming product delivered to 40%, this would demonstrate continual improvement, but would hardly be acceptable, given the
industry sector’s zero percent normal rate. However, if it announced that it had set an objective to improve its performance from 0.50% to 0.40%, this would be much nearer the market norm.
The Company needs to demonstrate to the auditor how it has determined this proposed rate of improvement, how it has evaluated the associated risks, and how this relates to customer requirements and the monitoring of feedback on customer satisfaction.

What sort of information is relevant?

The Organisation has to demonstrate how the overall corporate objectives have been translated into internal requirements throughout the appropriate processes, and how these requirements are communicated and monitored. So, the organisation should be analysing data from process monitoring, and then taking the results forward for evaluating process efficiency and/or improving process output.

Examples of areas where the quality management system can be improved include, but are not limited to:

• internal communications,

• follow-up activities,

• documented procedures,

• the effectiveness of management review meetings,

• customer feedback systems, and

• training programs (e.g. for management or for internal auditors).

The corporate objectives are translated into specific QMS objectives. For example: an organization could set an objective to reduce customer complains by 30%. The top management analysis shows that 50% of the complaints concern overdue deliveries. The auditor should then look for evidence that the organization is monitoring and analysing key aspects of its scheduling and planning activities, throughout its processes, and the process interfaces, to reduce delays.

Improvement of the product, process or improvement of the QMS?

It is important to understand that continual improvement doesn’t necessarily just mean continual improvement of product or process, but can and should also apply to the quality management system itself.

It would be unrealistic to expect an organization to make progress on all potential improvements simultaneously. Continual improvement should be interpreted as a recurring (step by step) activity. What it means is when opportunities for improvement are identified and when such improvements are justified, an organization needs to decide how they are to be implemented, based on the available resources.

Each improvement will require the commitment of resources, which may need prioritisation by top management, especially where investments are needed. The improvement objectives are consistent overall, and are coherent with the trilogy of factors mentioned above. However, an organization that does not have a policy and objectives relating to continual improvement is clearly not complying with the standard.

Similarly, the absence of any evidence of improvement on at least one of these aspects would have to be considered as indicating that an organization’s quality policy is not in line with ISO 9001.

There is no requirement that the organization should set objectives for improvement of all its processes at any one time. As in the above example on reducing customer complaints, some processes may not be deemed by top management to contribute significantly to the reduction of delays, and it is only normal therefore, that the organization would not concentrate on these areas.

If the top management has set a (realistic) objective for a process, and there is no evidence of improvement, this information must be fed back into the management review so that top management can decide what type of action is appropriate – for example, re-adjusting the objective or providing other means to impact on the process.

To satisfy the competence/effectiveness requirements of ISO 9001, an organisation will typically need to do several things:-

Identify what competencies are required by personnel performing work which affects quality

• Identify which personnel already performing the work have the required competencies

• Decide what additional competencies are required

• Decide how these additional competencies are to be obtained – training of personnel (external or internal), theoretical or practical training, hiring of new competent personnel, assignment of existing competent personnel to different work

• Train, hire or reassign personnel

• Review the effectiveness of actions taken to satisfy competence needs and to ensure that the necessary competence has been achieved

Throughout the process, the organisation is required to maintain appropriate records of education, training, skills and experience. However, ISO 9001 does not specify how the process will be established or the exact nature of the records to be maintained.

In auditing an organisation’s compliance with the competence and training evaluation requirements, an Auditor would typically be seeking evidence that the following issues are addressed:-

1 – An organisation needs to identify what competencies are required by personnel performing work that affects quality.

2 – Are competent people assigned to those work place activities necessary to control the quality characteristics of its processes and products?

3- The organization needs to evaluate the effectiveness of the actions taken to satisfy the competence needs and to ensure that the necessary competence has been achieved.

4 – Maintenance of competence.

Interface continues to comply with the most up to date and relevant standards. We only employ IRCA certified auditors who are fully competent and able to conduct ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 audits. We have a complex method of identifying and assessing our auditors to ensure they remain current and aware of auditing principles and technical advances in their relevant technical fields.

In conjunction with the client, we assess the key requirements of the organisation to ensure we match a fully competent auditor who knows about the product or service that the company provides and the relevant processes that are part of that business. Therefore when the Interface Auditor arrives, they should be fully familiar with the business and its activities to ensure a smooth and seamless assessment.

This new updated standard is also applicable to Internal Auditors, all Internal Auditors should also be familiar with the principles within this standard, if you require any further information, please do not hesitate to contact us on info@interface.co.uk

We always welcome feedback on our Services and how to improve them for you, please feel free to drop us a line if you have any comments or suggestions.

A major recruitment company in the West Midlands has become the latest Company to join the ever growing club of Companies accross the UK to be Certified by Interface.

By identifying how the Company were already meeting the requirements of the standard and reporting on the areas that needed improvement, the Company were able to become certified within 6 weeks.

Praxiom Research Group, Canada, have requested that we remove a post that appears to have been inadvertently copied from their site, which we have done (ISO 14001 environmental management Requirements). Their site is well worth a visit for the excellent content simplifying ISO standards there  - http://www.praxiom.com/  along with a range of useful looking products.

So what happened? Well, it is difficult to know for sure, but one of us or one of our researchers appears to have grabbed it, removed some of the material, and put it in a word document without a source. I then picked it up as ‘ours’, added a header and out it went. The text is based on the text in ISO 14001, with the same heading numbers. But I should have realised that it wasnt from the standard as this text is readable and makes sense! Therefore maybe I can turn this into an advert for Ron Krebs and the people at Praxiom: Their plain English products do what they say on the tin!

Time for us to be logging a non-conformity and coming up with an appropriate corrective action I think.

One of our auditors, Paul Chadderton, has come up with this detailed description of ISO 9001 requirements, in less than 200 words! I think this is a really useful description and a great help to clients in understanding what is required by the standard.