Is ISO Standards always good for Your Company?

I have worked with many companies to achieve a variety of registrations. As a sales manager, auditor, consultant and trainer, I have noticed that a number of companies haven’t realized the benefits that they expected from standards registration. Some of them have actually become worse off than before they started.

“What am I missing?” I’m often asked. “My compliance to this standard isn’t improving my systems, and it isn’t increasing my customers’ satisfaction.” The answer to this question varies by company and types of implementation, but the solution is straightforward.

Companies that aren’t getting the desired results of standards registration are generally one or more of the following:

• Companies that over documented the management system
• Lean companies with ambitious schedules and deadlines
• Businesses with strong management styles that have become disillusioned with customer-required standards and programs. Personnel charged with implementing documented systems don’t have any more respect for them than top management demonstrates.
• Inadequate training and unnecessary restrictions through over documentation can set any quality system up for failure. Additionally, employees must understand the benefits and restrictions of the system. International standards are written to allow the flexibility needed for companies to be compliant without giving up efficiency and effectiveness.

Once this ineffective, formal ISO 9001 or ISO/TS16949 documented system is in place, what’s on paper hinders getting products shipped or services completed. It becomes almost impossible to deliver products or perform services efficiently, and to complete all of the paperwork and other system requirements. In the end, management begins telling staff, “Just get the job done, get the paperwork later.” This may be appropriate in the short term. If all the extra paperwork and requirements are completed, the company may not be around to solve the over documentation issue.

Over documentation can be a result of many different factors, including:

• Incomplete understanding of the requirements and intent of the standards
• The wrong approach to corrective actions
• Not fully addressing what’s important to the business or management when creating the documentation
• Consultants focusing on delivering more paperwork for your implementation dollar

If the quality system is set up based on any combination of these situations, personnel begin to ignore it and companies begin taking short cuts.

Eventually, employees become uncertain of what’s required, what’s a guideline and what can generally be ignored. This can be done while maintaining good quality products and services, but, again, only for the short term. Employees, over time, don’t know what paperwork or system to attend to and which to overlook. Nothing written can be considered important. The overriding culture requires pleasing management, shipping product and ignoring paperwork and other system requirements. Such companies end up worse off because they’ve lost the informal systems and culture that made them successful in the first place. The implicit culture familiar to employees holds that no paperwork is valuable and the “boss” doesn’t do what he says through the formal, documented system.

One telltale sign of this condition is a scramble to prepare for registrar audits by completing requirements and paperwork. The company may do well on an audit, but it’s like winning money you can’t spend. Fabricated paperwork after the fact adds no value for the company or the customer.

The natural progression from this scenario is that these documented systems begin to fail. The usual issues, like employee turnover and new product launches, add to the bottleneck. Negative trends show up in your metrics, quality concerns increase and profits diminish. Safety and environmental issues may begin to surface. Your documented system has become an exceptional-looking “show car” that has nothing inside. It looks good, but it won’t take you anywhere. You spend all of your time fixing problems instead of improving your processes. Your company culture doesn’t support the system or the changes. This adds to the idea that ISO 9001 or ISO/TS 16949 isn’t working when, in fact, it was never properly implemented.

In truth, if a good system is put in place and if employees are trained and motivated to use it properly, compliance to the standards should benefit the entire company. A correctly documented and implemented system will take no additional time and will be able to drive improvement and keep a company competitive.

Following are some solutions to keep your documented system working properly:

• Get rid of all unnecessary paperwork. It’s better to start with less and fine-tune as you go.
• Train everyone—management and employees—on a simpler system.
• Motivate employees to follow the system and to recommend changes.
• Set goals and keep everyone in the company accountable.
• Continuously improve systems.

I would rather see a company reduce more paperwork than it should. At least this way its employees would always have time to complete their tasks, with no contradictions from management. We can always add as we find the need. This isn’t an extraordinary amount of work, but it requires a true commitment by the management team.

This can be done effectively in several ways, including:

• Implementing lean or kaizen events
• Reducing documentation girth during an upgrade to a new revision of the standard (e.g. ISO 9000 to ISO/TS 16949)
• Constantly asking why. A very effective trainer, lean guru and planner once told me that most adults should take a lesson from a 6-year-old child and start asking

“Why?” again. Why do we need to fill out four forms to accept a $1,000 order from a loyal customer? The answer is, “You don’t.” When companies are properly documented, the culture will be one of reinforcement. Employees will be completing procedures and forms because they support the company’s management and business goals. It doesn’t mean that they’ll understand the purpose of every document they touch, but it does mean that the overwhelming majority of the documentation makes good sense to the staff who use them.

So next time you pick up a procedure or complete a form, take a second glance at it and ask why it’s there. If you don’t know the answer, find someone who should. If you can’t find anyone who knows and the document isn’t legal in nature, try removing it from your system and determine the effects.

When formal documented systems are implemented to meet ISO 9001 or ISO/TS 16949 in the proper way, they add value to a business and make great sense to all concerned.

Author : Brandon Kerkstra, the president of Management Solutions Group Inc., write for qualitydiggest.com