(ISO) Quality Manual Chat

One company owner I worked with took a while to understand what ISO9001:2000 is all about. At one point he wanted to include quality objectives that were not measurable. They were subjective evaluations.

He asked me if every objective needed to be measurable. Couldn’t they just have as an objective something to the effect of “better quality”, or “more satisfied customers”? The short answer is “no”. I suspect that while he was excited about getting the nice certificate on the wall, he wasn’t too keen on actually following the requirements if ISO9001:2000.

ISO9001:2000 is all about continual improvement. In order to steer a ship you need to know where you are, and where you want to go. It’s the same with a quality management system. Without concrete numbers, its difficult to know where you are, and how you are progressing.

Let’s say you’ve got a website that is a forum with news and reviews on a particular topic, such as motorcycles. You intend to have advertising on your site, so it is a profit making venture. How would you implement an ISO9001:2000 quality management system for such a business?

Your “product” would be your website. Your customers are the good people who will hopefully send you checks to advertise on your site. Would the ISO requirement for Design and Development apply? Probably. You are, after all, continually designing and developing your website. I think it would be fairly easy to document a process of how your website is designed and written. Maybe there could be a process whereby any new content is reviewed and must be approved by the company owner, or some person other than the writer. You could have an electronic signature on the document to provide proof that the process was followed.

How would you measure customer satisfaction? Since you don’t have a physical product, you can’t count the number of returns. There are a myriad of other ways you can measure customer satisfaction here.

You could always ask your customer how you’re doing and document the results. Hopefully you would format your questions so they’re in the form of objective numbers, which would be easy to quantity and track. Over time, hopefully, your customer satisfaction numbers should increase.

You could also count the number of clicks from your readers to the advertisers’ websites. I guarantee your advertisers are keeping track of this, you should too.

In a weird way it’s kind of interesting to think about esoteric little businesses and how ISO9001:2000 may or may not work out. I’ve yet to find a business where ISO doesn’t apply.

Your ISO9001:2000 quality management system (QMS) should be tailored to your organization. The Customer Related Process discussed here is one process that may be used by quite a few companies, but may not necessarily relate to your situation. You have to decide for yourself.

The Cycle Guys is a company that sells motorcycle parts. Orders are called in, or sent via a website. Occasionally a customer might call back to add something, change an item, or cancel their order. Obviously if the customer has waited too long, and the order has shipped, then there’s not too much Cycle Guys can do about it.

However there are times when the customer calls with changes before the order has shipped. The Cycle Guys must devise a way to control their order process so that the correct order is shipped to the customer. How to do this?

At The Cycle Guys, when a sales order is entered into their computer, a copy of the order is printed out for shipping.

The Cycle Guys quality procedure states that the salesperson taking the customer call must immediately walk out to the warehouse to find the physical copy of the order. If the order has already been picked, the salesperson must notify the shipping person that the order will be changed. Whether or not the order has already been picked, the salesperson must find the physical copy of the order and destroy it. Only after the physical sales order is destroyed is the salesperson to then enter the new sales order.

This system depends on the salesperson doing his job and following the procedure. There might be a better way to do this depending on software capabilities of the company, how many people work there, and a variety of other issues. But for a small, 4 person company such as The Cycle Guys, this procedure seems to be working fine.