ISO 9001: From Certification to Re-certification

[Shalini]

For an organization that is fully committed to follow its QMS and continuous improvement, recertification will become a natural process step. However, many companies fail in maintaining ISO 9001 certification requirements and eventually lose the certified status during their next certification cycle. Typical reasons for such failure can be broadly categorized into: commitment, competence, complexity and change management, statuses of all of which can get altered from the state before.

When a senior management of a company embarks on an ISO journey for reputation alone, quality management and continuous improvement are hard to accomplish. Processes don’t get followed effectively and quality management remains on paper. Personnel who are managing ISO requirements, who fail to maintain a quality management system, will fail in enforcing continuous improvement. Assigning responsibility of quality management system to external contractors alone and not having efficient internal oversight will also result in a failure of the system. Competence in the personnel responsible for maintaining a QMS is an absolute requirement and needs to be planned and implemented through regular training programs. Some organizations make QMS too complex to adopt. This typically happens when several different systems are put in place and understanding the system relationships is hard for the employees who use them. This can be easily avoided by engaging an Enterprise QMS software that integrates all quality management activities into a single platform.