In article ,
Capitol writes:


Andy Hall wrote:

Quality managers revel in this stuff and talk about "delighting" their
customers. This has always concerned me.

It should!!

As one of the unhappy people saddled with writing and agreeing the
BS9000 crap, I KNOW that a BS/ISO9000 quality standard is not worth the
hot air and paper that surrounds it.

I'm not going to try and defend it, but it is completely misunderstood.
Getting certified is about having procedures in place, and documented
and followed. Well, just about every company has procedures in place
which amounts to what it does in its day-to-day work. All that's
normally required is that these be documented. You can document that
you chuck all customer complaints in the waste bin, don't answer the
phone until at least 25 rings, don't pay suppliers for 180 days, whatever...
Just make sure you stick to it and keep enough records to show this,
and you can become ISO certified. That doesn't have to cost a fortune.

What I often see companies doing is hiring in a Quality Consultant
(that's Quality as a noun, definately not an adjective as you'll see).
What turns up is a middle manager who lost his job on the early 1990's,
and discovered he could sell himself as a Quality Consultant, because
even though he had no clue what that was, neither did any of his clients.
Now as a consultant, his primary task is to make his job last as long
as possible. That in itself is clearly expensive to the company, but
the ultimate aim is to persuade the company that quality is an ongoing
thing (which is true) so they'll need to retain his services for the
forseeable future (which is pointless as he's clueless, but so are
they). Now he needs to be seen to be doing something, so he will start
going round the company and interfering (more cost), changing processes
so management can see he's having an effect. Sometimes the consultant
is actually so completely clueless about getting certified, that this
stage just goes on forever, with the company getting more tangled up
in pointless process, whilst the consultant keeps claiming the company
is not yet ready. Other times, the consultant might actually manage
to get certification.

If you want to obtain ISO qualification, start by documenting what
you already do, without changing anything. This is a good time to look
at what you documented to see if there's anything silly (there often
is) and think about fixing that, but it's not normally required that
you turn the company upside down by changing just about all processes.
If you are aiming to improve the quality of some aspect of your
company, then you can tackle it at this stage. The other thing you
need to do is to keep sufficient records to later show that you are
keeping to the procedures you documented.

If you are interested in working with other companies who are ISO
certified, then the certificate itself is worthless. What you need
to do is have a read of their Quality Manual, so you can check what
it says about how long they take to pay their suppliers, or whatever
aspects are particularly relevant to you.

It was originally set up as a MIL
spec to provide traceability for the US space program, but proved too

My recollection when I first came across it (BS5750 at the time), was
that it came out of the GPO. This later morphed into the ISO9000 series.
Military work had its own quite separate standards from what I recall.

--
Andrew Gabriel