ISO 9001 is the international standard for Quality Management Systems (QMS), published by ISO (International Organization for Standardization), an independent non-governmental body with 164 members representing most of the countries of the world. The standard was last updated in 2015 and is therefore currently in the ISO 9001: 2015 version. At each meeting, ISO 9001 receives the approval of the majority of member states, in order to enjoy the status of an internationally recognized standard. The Quality Management System, often also called simply QMS, is a collection of policies, processes, documented procedures and records. This set of documents, in any format, defines the internal rules that describe how your company creates and delivers the product or service to customers. The QMS must be tailored to the needs of your company and the product or service it offers, but the ISO 9001 standard provides a set of guidelines to ensure that you do not overlook any important element necessary for the success of a QMS.

ISO 9001: 2015 is a standard designed to be used by organizations of any size or sector, as well as by any company. As an international standard, it is recognized as the basis for creating a system that ensures customer satisfaction and improvement in any company and, therefore, many important companies provide it as a minimum requirement for the qualification of their suppliers.

Companies certified ISO 9001 are subject to an initial certification and subsequently to annual surveillance audits by an Accredited Third Party. This allows you to simplify the qualification process of your suppliers and to have simplifications in accreditation with your customers.

Furthermore, ISO 9001 has become a necessity for all those companies that want to participate in public and private calls for tenders, in which the standard is now a prerequisite.

Finally, a certified company reassures its customers since it has adopted a management system based on the seven quality principles of ISO 9001 which are:

Attention to the customer

Since the entire goal of a company is to provide products or services to customers, it makes sense to focus on them as the main element. This begins with knowing the customer and his needs, ensuring communication throughout the process and measuring their satisfaction in order to measure whether the requirements, whether explicit or not, have been met.

Importance of top management leadership

To function, a QMS needs the full involvement of the Company Management.

Management should create and maintain an internal environment that fully involves staff in the pursuit of the organization's objectives.

Involvement of people

It is important that people across the organization create value, especially in our competitive and ever-growing world. To ensure this, the QMS must focus on people's competence and growth to help them engage in the processes to create value in them. Having empowered and involved people in the organization, they will be the driving force for achieving the objectives.

The process approach

Trying to understand, control and improve a complex system can often be complicated and tiring. The QMS invites us to see, break down and manage our organization into individual processes. Identifying, understanding and managing (as if they were a system) interrelated processes contributes to the organization's effectiveness in achieving its objectives. Controlling and improving individual processes can be a much simpler and more effective way to control and improve the entire system.

Continuous improvement

Companies that remain the same over time in an increasingly competitive market will quickly be overtaken by the competition. To counter this pressure, the company must constantly improve. This allows the company to react to changes in internal or external conditions to create new opportunities. Goals must be planned and SMART (specific, measurable, accepted, realistic, timely, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, defined over time) and will not work without commitment to change.

Evidence-based decision making

It has now been proven that you are more likely to get the results you want by basing your decisions on data analysis and evaluation rather than an instinctive interpretation of the situation. This is why the ISO 9001 requirements focus on monitoring and measurement. To say that a process is working properly, we need adequate data and benchmarks to plan and evaluate improvements. For this reason, maintaining good, real, lean but precise documentation becomes essential to facilitate many of the other quality management principles.

Relationship management

Since interaction with stakeholders such as customers, employees and suppliers can affect an organization's performance, managing these relationships is critical. The focus is often on managing relationships with the supplier network, but maintaining the relationships of all parties is important to maximize their impact on the organization and make lasting success more likely. Successful companies see these relationships as partnerships rather than strictly customer / supplier interactions.

Why is ISO 9001 good for your organization?

You improve your image and credibility - When customers see that you are certified by an authoritative body, they understand that you have implemented a system focused on satisfying customer requirements and improving. This increases their confidence in your ability to do what you promise.

Improve customer satisfaction - as we have seen, one of the key principles of the ISO 9001 QMS is to focus on improving customer satisfaction, identifying and satisfying their requirements and needs. By improving satisfaction, you increase customer loyalty.

Complete process integration - Using the process approach of ISO 9001, you not only consider the individual processes in your organization, but also the interactions of those processes. By doing so, it is easier to identify areas for improvement and resource savings within your organization.

Use of fact-based decisions - Ensuring that decisions are made based on factual facts is a key to success for an ISO 9001 QMS. Initially for some it may be an effort, but in this way, they can better target resources to better correct problems and improve their efficiency and organizational effectiveness.

Create a culture of continuous improvement - With continuous improvement as the main output of the QMS, you can achieve ever greater results in terms of saving time, money and resources. By introducing this culture into your company, you can make your workforce focus on improving the processes they are directly responsible for.

Involving people - Who better than the people who work in a process can find the most effective solutions to improve that process? By focusing your workforce engagement not only on retention but also on improving processes, your staff will be more involved in the organization's results.

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See you soon,

Aesse team

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