What Is ISO 9001 & Why Is It Important?
ISO 9001 can significantly benefit any business. It refines your organization’s processes and quality management system, making it an essential tool in the modern business world.
In 2022, 1,265,216 certificates were gained for ISO 9001 in 188 countries.
Source: https://www.iso.org/the-iso-survey.html
Contents
- What is ISO 9001 & Why is it Important?
- Benefits Of ISO 9001
- How is it Used Today?
- How ISO 9001 Helps Your Business
- How it Helps Your Customers
- What is The Difference Between ISO 9000 And ISO 9001?
- Seven Quality Management Principles
- Different Sectors That Use ISO 9001
- What Has Recently Changed?
- Why ISO 9001 is Still Relevant Today
Benefits Of ISO 9001
Higher Customer Satisfaction
Consumers, regardless of industry, drive up profits and sales and are the company's lifeline outside of the employees.
It is safe to say customers are essential to a company’s success, so ensuring they are delighted as much as possible is vital. Improving this area is one of the fundamental principles of ISO 9001.
By improving customer satisfaction, you will see a higher percentage of returning customers and new customers becoming pleased with your products or services. Improving satisfaction for both old and new customers is important to maintaining your business’s longevity, so having a system like ISO 9001 to improve it is quite handy.
Improved Integration
Another great perk of ISO 9001 is improved process integration. This means that problems can be solved with minimum spending and maximum efficiency. Cutting resource costs is always a great way to save money and will allow your team to focus on other areas that need attention and improvement.
New Standard
With ISO 9001, your business automatically gains a positive reputation just for having the certification. It is well respected in any field and gives your organization credentials that it may not have had before.
Boost Staff Productivity
Employees are always more productive when they can be more efficient and have the right amount of resources behind them — and ISO 9001 offers just that. A quality management system that follows ISO 9001 requirements teaches employees how to perform their roles more efficiently while teaching management how to best delegate resources to the areas of the organization that need more attention.
A new ISO 9001-based QMS will also include programs that further develop employees' abilities and teach them new skills.
Increase in Profit
This ties in with many of the benefits already mentioned, such as boosted staff productivity and increased customer satisfaction. Improving in those two areas alone highly influences positive profit margins that will increase over time, which is always one of the primary goals of any organization.
This also stems from an increase in efficiency, which is yet another benefit of the system. By eliminating useless spending in areas that do not need it, time and resources can be allocated to the areas that will benefit most from it.
This, in return, will increase revenue as well, as the once weaker areas will start to grow, making the organization much more balanced overall.
Maintain Standards
In any professional business, it’s important to ensure that the organization's required standards are properly met. This is why many businesses today use IS0 9001.
Since ISO 9001 was last updated in 2015, is it still relevant today? ISO 9001 has been working to change and evolve as the economy changes and evolves. This system meets specific principles, objectives, and goals for their business.
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How Is It Used Today?
ISO 9001 is one of the top standards for quality management systems and is recognized globally for its efficiency with businesses.
ISO 9001 helps your organization grow and meet its goals by structuring and planning the execution accordingly. As your business's requirements and rules change and grow, the plans set out by ISO 9001 will change and evolve along with them. It works to help your business truly accomplish and achieve its goals.
What is a Quality Management System?
Since ISO 9001 is considered a quality management system, it’s important to learn more about what exactly a quality management system is. A quality management system has a specific formula for tracking different companies' procedures and quality policies and how the business will meet them.
It also includes other processes to help achieve different goals and objectives of your business.
As a business, you’ll have different regulatory and overall customer requirements and needs that must be met. A quality management system ensures that you are doing this by helping your business gain better efficiency and effective business needs consistently and continuously.
A QMS always helps your business ensure it’s doing what needs to be done to see success and continue to stay on the same beat of your business. It also ensures your company is sticking to the routine needed to keep up with the various changes and standards.
Below are the more specific purposes a quality management service will continuously serve to complete for your business. This is also what you’ll expect to see from using this standard:
- The staff is more engaged and seen as accountable for their performance and responsibilities
- Waste within the company and business is lessened and reduced overall
- Different processes throughout day-to-day engagement are improved
- Costs and overall budget in the company are lowered
- Direction is given not just to specific teams or members of the company but to the entire organization as a whole
- Different training methods and opportunities are identified, facilitated and implemented to provide more leadership throughout the entire company
How ISO 9001 Helps Your Business
When hearing about these different factors of ISO 9001, it’s easy to become a little intimidated and expect it to be a complicated and strenuous process. They work to give your company a reasonably simple system to make everyone in the organization’s lives at least a little easier. If implemented and handled correctly, you can find a system that improves your organization's different areas and departments.
Below are a few ways your business can be improved by using ISO 9001 systems:
- Different management processes are created through the system that helps establish a solid foundation
- Productivity will drastically increase
- A rise in profits will start to form
- Not only will new customers be acquired, but different strategies will be set in place to improve the retention of customers as well
- Motivates your staff members by helping them increase their work ethic and productivity around the office
- The service also highlights problems or deficiencies in your company’s various services and products
- Identifying different problems can help motivate your employees to come up with new solutions and ways to improve the company
- This allows customers to give fewer complaints and issues with your service
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How ISO 9001 Helps Your Customers
Since ISO 9001 has been around for a long time, it’s well-known and widely recognizable to different people, especially your customers. Once they see your business and notice that you’re ISO certified, it could be something that stands out to them and differentiates your company from others.
This can greatly benefit you when a customer decides to use your business over another.
Additionally, using ISO 9001 helps your customers by decreasing mistakes, and it helps provide effective deliveries by creating more reliable schedules. ISO 9001 also distributes annual assessments for your company to ensure that the specific business standards are constantly met and maintained.
Customers are aware of this, so they know that if you’re ISO 9001 certified, it could mean you’re up to date with the required standards.
ISO 9001 is known as a quality systems management program, which means it works to ensure minimal mistakes by your company. Customers will also be aware of this and will be more attracted to your service.
What Is The Difference Between ISO 9000 And ISO 9001?
Regarding ISO 9000 and ISO 9001, people don’t quite understand the differences. While they, of course, share similar names, there are some key differentiating factors between the two that should be kept in mind.
ISO 9000
This is known as a family, or series called by others. These are standards that are quality management-related and upheld by the overall standards of quality management. It’s also the owner of individual standards that work to display the vocabulary and fundamentals of QMS.
It informs others of the different factors of quality management and describes the various standards involved in ISO. ISO 9000 gives businesses the tools and guidance needed to stay on top of their service and product requirements.
ISO 9001 helps maintain accuracy, meets customer requirements, and ensures that business performance is always being improved.
ISO 9001
Since ISO 9000 is the overall series of the quality management system, ISO 9001 is the set standard located inside this family or series. Of course, this lays out the requirements and criteria to meet the standards, but it is the main software that contains the actual certification.
This is the actual software and service you’ll be using as part of the overall 9000 system. Your business will be getting certified in it and following its guidelines.
Seven Quality Management Principles
The ISO family prioritizes several strategic principles when making quality management decisions for each company. These principles help each business grow and develop as a whole.
Below are the seven principles of quality management that senior managers in each company are encouraged to follow to encourage positive development and improvement within their business.
1 Customer Focus
Focusing more on customers and their specific needs provides satisfaction to them every day. ISO 9001 requires businesses to link their objectives to the needs of their customers and see what they need to develop personal relationships with them.
ISO 9001 helps you better understand the needs of your current customers and the customers you hope to gain in the future. It also enables you to develop a system that effectively aligns your company's objectives and goals and ensures they match well with your customers' expectations, wants and needs.
Your customers also have requirements they want to focus on regarding what they desire in a company. Being ISO 9001 certified helps you achieve this by learning and working to meet their requirements.
You can also measure your customers' satisfaction to learn what your business is doing correctly and incorrectly and how to improve.
2 Leadership
If you’re a business professional, you’re well aware of the impact different people in leadership roles can have on the company and, most importantly, its employees. ISO 9001 manages this by ensuring that leadership makes the resources available and accessible for all employees.
It also encourages leadership to communicate the company's mission, strategy and vision to all employees.
Employees in a leadership role are encouraged to direct the organization with different challenging goals they must overcome. The ISO family ensures that leadership should work to establish trust within the company and create values within the organization that everyone must follow.
Leadership should also work to empower their employees and be well aware of the contributions being made by their employees while on the job. With ISO 9001, leadership is given better direction to do all this efficiently and well thought out.
When people see that a company is ISO 9001 certified, they will know that it cares about leadership values, which will make a future employee eager to work there or a customer eager to work with a company that values its employees, meaning it could value its customers.
3 Engagement of People
ISO 9001 encourages companies to empower their employees to engage, be motivated, and be involved while at the company. This makes everyone there want to learn more and collaborate as a team.
It helps create different functionalities and guidelines for leadership to ensure their employees’ abilities and talents are appropriately utilized and valued. People are encouraged to participate in employee activities and different participation opportunities.
ISO 9001 also works to enable the sharing of knowledge with its employees and also helps give them a chance to learn more. Employee engagement is an essential factor in the ISO 9001 equation, making more people value the importance of certification.
4 Process Approach
When a system is implemented to help a company run efficiently, a process approach is taken. ISO 9001 measures and manages the different processes and their activities.
It also works to identify how these activities link and fit together to learn what can be improved within the company. From there, these opportunities can be appropriately prioritized and enhanced efficiently.
5 Improvement
This aspect of ISO 9001 encourages businesses to dedicate time to improving their organization and aligning their external and internal values and performances with their customers.
It helps encourage employees to work to improve themselves and measure their improvements accordingly to take it into account and receive encouragement.
6 Evidence-Based Decision Making
With ISO 9001, evidence can be gathered that is data-specific to analyze and gather important information for businesses to learn what they need to improve upon. This also helps them decide what to do next to achieve these improvements.
Using the practical experience utilized earlier, different newer methods can be implemented to find factors within the company that need to be changed or improved.
7 Relationship management
By using ISO 9001 to find specific suppliers, your business costs can be maintained and managed. This helps determine what resources can be utilized and optimized to build and create value for your customers.
If you establish relationships with your customers now, you have a greater chance of keeping these relationships for the long haul, increasing customer retention. Not only are you developing relationships with your customers, but relationships are also being created with your partners and stakeholders.
This helps you see the success of not only your own company but also your suppliers. With ISO certification, you share your plans, resources, expertise, information and more with partners, suppliers and even customers if you wish.
Different Sectors That Use ISO 9001
Some specific industries and sectors use this series to provide their business with a strong and effective company to ensure it’s running well. Below are the sectors that you will find ISO 9001 works with to develop applications for their specific industry:
ISO 13485:2016 Medical (or any company selling medical devices)
ISO 18091:2014 Law, Administration or local government
ISO/TS 29001:2010 Natural Gas and/or Chemicals
ISO/IEC 90003:2014 Software Engineering
ISO/TS 22163:2017 Railway organizations
What Has Recently Changed?
As businesses change, the creators of ISO 9001 have realized the need for their software to change and grow, as well as to keep up with the evolving standards of these companies. As businesses become more complex and our economy, ISO 9001 works to keep up with that so they can remain consistent and relevant today.
The newer version has focused on building a system that works with managers to help them collaborate better with the members of their organization to best suit their specific needs. In addition, the newer version has made it a requirement for leaders and others working at the higher levels in the company to stay involved constantly when it comes to business development and strategy.
Additionally, the updated ISO 9001 uses core text and structure as it works to enhance more of its management standards to bring more functionality and improvement to an organization.
Why ISO 9001 is Still Relevant Today
ISO works to constantly improve itself in order to remain relevant and always consistent with the constant changes that are happening in the economy and the world overall.
Following ISO methodology will help give you a strong strategy for the growth of your business.
Promote your certification to let your customers know of your commitment to them and to running a business that goes above and beyond to meet and surpass their expectations.
