A Time to Improve

Since the goal of ISO certification is to ensure that your company meets standards for quality management systems, your focus should be first and foremost on quality and not the certification itself. Your company should not try to get ISO certified for the sake of being certified, but rather look at it as a way to improve your company’s efficiency and quality processes. Before seeking certification, review your company’s procedures and processes. I dentify disparities between procedures and what is actually done. If what is actually done is more efficient than the written procedure, you should update the written procedure rather than conform to the less-efficient guidelines.

Any good business management system should keep adequate records, and they are essential for ISO certification. One of the required documented procedures is one for controlling records – what identifies every record, how they are stored to protect them, how they are cataloged or organized, how long you keep them, and how you dispose of them. Spend some time reviewing your procedure and examining whether your management follows it; then decide which procedure is the most efficient and appropriate for the nature of each record. This is a time when you can eliminate unnecessary processes, create new ones, identify mishandles processed and make record-keeping more efficient overall. Approaching it from a self-improvement standpoint will be much more effective and pleasant than trying to cover up mistakes that have been made before an ISO audit.