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Currently, there are around 1,077,884 valid ISO 9001 certificates globally – which beats the second runner, ISO 14001, by over 600,000!

There is no doubt that the Quality Management Standard, ISO 9001, is still the most widely adopted ISO Standard – and for good reason!

ISO 9001 is basically a model for running a successful and profitable business. It provides a common framework for things that all businesses should have in place, including defining your companies unique ‘way of working’.

In addition to being a blueprint for a business’s operation, there are many other benefits to be gained from implementing ISO 9001. Today, Mel explains a few of these benefits in greater detail.

You’ll learn

• What is ISO 9001?  
• Why Implement ISO 9001?  
• The benefits of ISO 9001

Resources

• What is ISO 9001?
• Isologyhub

In this episode, we talk about:

[00:30] Why talk about ISO 9001 benefits? Often times, Mel gets asked for benefits of ISO 9001 so a business case can be put forward.

[01:00] What is ISO 9001? For a detailed break down of the Standard, go back and watch ‘Episode 36 – What is ISO 9001?’

[01:45] For those that have Implemented ISO 9001, what are the benefits? We’d love to hear from you! If you have some stories to share – feel free to leave a comment on which ever media player you’re listening on – or email us. We’d love to share some of your experiences in a future episode.   

[02:09] Benefit #1: Win new business – From a sales and marketing perspective, ISO 9001 is essentially a passport to trade. It demonstrates credibility to Stakeholders as it’s a mark of quality.

[02:55] Benefit #2: A framework that can fit any business – This can be for any industry sector and business size. It helps businesses figure out what is working well and what’s not working so well.

[03:10] Benefit #3: Identify opportunities for Improvement – It helps businesses figure out what is working well and what’s not working so well. It can help identify issues such as: Bottlenecks in processes, resourcing and external factors.

[04:05] ISO 9001 helps you to look at your business – warts and all. It does no one any good to bury their head in the sand and ignore issues, especially as Stakeholders and clients will see through this.

[04:40] Benefit #4: Put quality controls in place to mitigate risk and raise your standards – If you have complaints or need to do a product recall – you need processes in place to handle this. ISO 9001 gives you the tools to do so, creating an effective framework everyone can follow.

[05:40] Benefit #5: Improve efficiency – ISO 9001 helps you identify the best way of working and pushes you to optimise that. That could include eliminating aspects of you business that waste time, or create burdens.

[06:05] Benefit #6: Creating a unique Blueprint – ISO 9001 isn’t an out of the box solution – it can be tailored to your way of working. It helps to establish relevant Policies and Procedures that improve your business operations.   

[06:24] Benefit #7: Enhancing customer satisfaction and employee retention – Good quality business practices will inevitably help you to keep ahold of good clients – and good employees too! This can be achieved by having clear roles and responsibilities in addition to vision and goals for the business.

[07:20] Benefit #8: Increase profitability – Businesses often look at the cost of poor quality – where is your business leaking money? Addressing those issues is a direct cost saving.

[08:21] Businesses who have grown through acquisition often find ISO 9001 a great tool to help standardise their way of working, so they can easily integrate other businesses and services.  

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What is the future for ISO 9001? It only seems like yesterday that the latest version of ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 was released, even though this was back in November 2015.  How time flies as they say! All organisations have now transitioned to the latest version, however, standards, the same as businesses can never afford to be left to stand still.  In true Deming fashion (Plan, do, check, act), the time has come for the next review and revision.  Next year, in 2020 the review process begins again…….

I was delighted to be joined on the ISO Show this week by Paul Simpson, Chair of the ISO 9001 Technical Committee in the UK (TC 176) and Director of Strategy to Action. 

In the ISO Show this week Paul explains:-

• How Annex L supersedes Annex SL
• What is the role of TC 176 and what they are currently doing in relation to ISO 9001?
• The future concepts for ISO 9001
• Views on whether ISO 9001 could change much following the review which begins in 2020

If you would like to find out more about Paul Simpson and his company, Strategy to Action, Action to Success, click HERE.

If you would like to find further information about the ISO 9001 Quality Technical Committee, click HERE.

Need assistance with ISO 9001? We’d be happy to help, simply Contact Us.

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• Share the ISO Show on twitter or Linkedin
• Leave an honest review on iTunes or Soundcloud. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one.

This is the second of a series of blogs, relating to Clause 8 of the new ISO 20000-1:2018, designed to unpack the requirements of the standard and remove that air of mystery that can so often form around standards. This week we’ll continue to look at clause 8.2 of the standard.

Service catalogue management

The Service Catalogue is often undervalued in service management systems, but it has a critical part to play in communicating to customers exactly what you can provide, and, above all, it should be used by Sales when selling services to a customer. If anyone sells anything that is not in the catalogue it is not the responsibility of your organisation to bend your processes to meet that service agreement. First, Sales should go back to the customer and advise them that the service cannot be delivered and second, the proposal put forward by Sales could be passed through the Design, Build and Transition process to produce a new service.

Sometimes it helps to see that Service Catalogue as something like an ‘Argos’ catalogue where all the wares for sale are recorded, but the customer doesn’t have to buy everything; they may choose to just by Incident Management or Service Request Management, but the catalogue will show them clearly how they might develop that service in the future.

The catalogue does not have to have the service prices printed in it as this will be part of the Sales discussion. One way of making the catalogue available to all interested parties is to put in on the company website or in a ‘customers only’ area of the website.

Asset management

Don’t look at Asset Management as purely being related to customer assets as the standard clearly states that ‘the organization shall ensure that assets used to deliver services are managed…’ So, a good asset management system can help here (if you are certified to ISO55001, much of the work will have been completed). What are the assets that should be considered?

–              Service Desk tools (Service Now etc)

–              Vehicles to get engineers and equipment to a customer site

–              Spares

–              IT equipment

–              Staff

This isn’t by any means an exhaustive list but just listing 4 items can show how broad this small clause can be. But don’t run away with the idea that you need to create a new job role to manage assets, instead look for where these are managed naturally in the business; staff by HR; Vehicles by facilities; Service Desk tools and IT equipment by the IT department; Spares by Procurement and Logistics. All these teams might be providing reports to the Service Delivery Manager/Director about the availability of the assets in their control.

Configuration management

Focus on Customer Assets takes place here. First, we need to understand what is meant by a Configuration Item (CI) – a CI is an asset that makes up part of the service.

The service itself could be a Configuration Item and all the assets used to deliver that service could all be classed as configuration items; but the main point of configuration management is to ensure that your organisation only services equipment under contract.

For every service established it is key to understand the exact equipment to be serviced; this can be determined through Model Numbers, Serial Numbers and or Asset Numbers (see below). This will enable the Service Desk staff to know what equipment is under contract and which equipment should be subject to a Service Charge. Without this you will end up servicing equipment that is not under contract

The standard is quite specific about what information should be recorded for each Configuration Item:

–              Unique identification (serial number, asset number)

–              Type of CI (the item or model number)

–              Description of the CI (detailed description of the item)

–              Relationship with other CIs (does this CI have any dependencies on or for other items; if changes are made will other CIs be affected?)

–              Status (is the CI still live or obsoleted in the service contract).

A configuration management list will be produced for each customer, but it is important that the list is reviewed at planned intervals (add this to the audit schedule) and audited to ensure that changes to the configuration estate have been captured. It is useful to ensure that a step in the Change Management process includes a review of the customer’s configuration list.

Need assistance with ISO 20000-1? We’d be happy to help, simply contact us at: enquiries@blackmoresuk.com

This is the first of a series of blogs, relating to Clause 8 of the new ISO 20000-1:2018, designed to unpack the requirements of the standard and remove that air of mystery that can so often form around standards.

8.1 Operational Planning and Control

Clause 8.1 of the standard relates to Operational planning and control. At first glance, it appears to be a copy of the requirements of ISO 9001:2015, but further reading shows that it is different.

If you are setting up your Service Management System in the order that the standard has been written, you will have arrived at clause 8 of the standard with risks, opportunities and objectives that need to be considered when establishing the Service Management System. Without this knowledge to hand you could develop and management system that does not address these risks and opportunities or enables the setting objectives.

The standard requires us to ‘establish performance criteria for the processes based on requirements’ or, in other words, what performance measures are needed to determine the effectiveness of processes in the service management system. These might include, performance against targets; numbers of incidents and problems; lost and gained services; volumes against Supply and Demand; Security breaches; customer satisfaction and complaints… plus much more. These measures must be appropriate to each individual business; don’t measure and monitor things that do not bring service improvement or customer satisfaction.

Once you understand the measurement criteria you can begin to build the Service Management system to meet these requirements; ‘implementing control of the processes in accordance with established performance criteria’, performance criteria communicated through SLAs, OLAs and KPIs.

A good management system doesn’t stop there as it will have determined what documented information needs to be kept, to demonstrate achievement of measures and compliance to the standard.

The control of planned changes and the review of the consequences of unintended changes leaves many with a challenge. We all understand planned changes, especially if we have an effective Change Management Process in place which will naturally control planned changes. However, the consequences of unintended change are a little vaguer, probably because it covers a broad subject; so, let’s unpack this further.

Unintended change might result from process creep where a process has been developed and moved away from its agreed path, without consultation with other departments that might be affected, and the consequence is the unintended change brought upon other processes which rely on the initial process that has been changed.

Other areas where the consequences of unintended change may be found are related to impacts of Incidents; Problems and Non-conformities where the errors have repercussions that are either unexpected or unintended and need further attention.

Another example in relation to this standard is ‘service creep’ where items of equipment owned by a customer and outside the contracted service agreement are swallowed up in the service contract because of poor asset management and configuration management, and you are effectively end up servicing equipment for free.

If these types of things occur it is important that the actions are investigated through to the root cause level to prevent their recurrence.

The final line ins 8.1 is about outsourced processes – one line that is very important to ensure compliance to the standard. In this standard, if any process is outsourced to a third party the organisation has a responsibility to ensure that the outsourced process is effective through setting appropriate SLAs or OLAs; and agreed service review meetings should be set up.

By implementing the rest of clause 8 of this standard then compliance to 8.1 will be achieved naturally.