Business Management Skills

ISO means international organization of standardization. This provides a group of standardised prerequisites for a quality management system irrespective of what the user organization does, the organization’s size, or if it’s a private or public organization. It is intended to help associations to ensure that the requirements of customers and other stake holders are met. ISO certification is not a compulsory requirement for establishments rather it’s self started. ISO certification has a considerable number of advantages like the creation of more effective and efficient operations, a rise in consumer satisfaction, an improvement in employee satisfaction and morale, the promotion of global trade, and the reducing of waste leading to a rise in profits.

ISO certification is the process which an organization must go through in order to be awarded a certificate of qualification. ISO certification is not awarded by ISO itself but many states have established certain bodies which audit organisations that apply for the ISO compliance certification. A moderate fee is charged by the ISO certification body for their service. The organization must first train all its staff on the ISO certification process, what should be expected, how it works and the reason why they must go through this process. Some key workers must also be trained on all the areas of the quality system. This will cut back the doubt and opposition of employees. The organization must also write all the needed documents as shown by the ISO quality standards and the company’s quality goals. This is the quality manual and contains a group of quality system processes. The organization should then practice and work with the quality system for a few months. This should give the organization a chance to make changes to their system. All of these changes must be documented.

After the organization has tried its new quality system, it is then audited. The amount of auditors needed and the time concerned in the audit will vary with the scale of the organization and the complexness of the business. The auditing is done on two levels. First there are the internal auditors (these are staff trained for this process) and this should give the organization opportunity to fine tune or to make changes to their quality system. After the internal audit is done and they are happy with their progress, there’s then an external audit by external auditors (these are auditors from the controlling body). This is done in order to make sure that the quality system is being followed from the top to the bottom, from the management down to the employees. Proof that the firm has been following the quality system must also be produced. This should be training records, inspection records, client feedback records and so forth. The external audit will ensure that the system is working. This is going to help the organization to discover where the system might be improved, to correct where the system is not working and to prevent problems from arising later on.

The external audit will then make corrections where it is their perspective that better procedures might be followed or they may approve the organizations current quality system. If they make proposals of some changes, they give the organization time to implement and to carry out. After 1 or 2 months, they then come back for another audit.
If they are satisfied the ISO certification process has been implemented, then the organization is awarded with a certificate of compliance.

Tony Connor is an expert on the ISO certification process and has worked with many big corporations to help them get certified. If you want to discover how it is possible to get ISO certification for your business please feel free to visit his website.