ISO 9001
According to wikipedia
ISO 9001:2008 Quality management systems – Requirements is intended for use in any organization regardless of size, type or product (including service). It provides a number of requirements which an organization needs to fulfill if it is to achieve customer satisfaction through consistent products and services which meet customer expectations. It includes a requirement for the continual (i.e. planned) improvement of the Quality Management System
In 2007, after we finished the move to the new factory, the management of the company met and we decided it was time to put in place some quality standards that everybody in the company could follow. We wanted worker A to see a piece of jewelry in the same manner as worker B would and we wanted the standards to remain the same in the long run.
We brought in some consultants and told them what we wanted to do:
• Describe each job and create work instructions for each of our processes so we could transfer the job if a worker left. At that time, we did not even have detailed qualifications requirement set down for each position.
• Set the quality standards for our products.
• Train our workforce.
• Increase the quality of our products by lowering the number of mistakes made.
The consultants said: “Oh! You want to do ISO 9001. It turned out it was exactly what we wanted to do, though we did not know the amount of work that would be involved…
We are now almost done with the ISO 9001 certification. The final inspection and certification should be done in July 2009.
It has been a long road with thousands of hours spent on standardizing our processes and writing down all that we do at every level of company operations. The major problem has been that when we said what we wanted to do, we actually meant it! We did not just pay lip service to the ISO guidelines (as it is possible to do), we followed them to the letter.
It has been worth it. The factory and company can now be managed efficiently by all the staff. When problems occur, procedures exist to analyze the problems and update our procedures for the future.
The next step will be ISO 14001 which is a standard for our environmental policy. We hope to begin with this next challenge in early 2010.
