When we talk to people about ISO9001 there are a few things that come up as the reasons not to do it, one is the need to document things, the other is around non-conformance and the final one is always the need for doing internal audits. Typically, I get told we fail enough external audits to know what we need to fix anyway! Or worse – we never fai...

The Problem One of our ISO9001 clients was struggling to collect customer satisfaction data from all their customers, they have over 50 active clients! They were concerned that they were not having meaningful conversations with their clients about issues that mattered to them rather than wasteful generic discussions that while they solved some issu...

Let's face it if you are working through ISO9001:2015 you already know that you need to monitor, measure, analyse and evaluate your quality management system, we talked about it way back in Clause 4.4 and again in Clause 6.2. You already understand why it's important so why is it here again in ISO9001:2015 Clause 9.1.1? I guess you could look at th...

I have a question for you to think about this week. How often have you had a conversation with a colleague, a staff member or perhaps even your partner where you left feeling sure they knew what to do, what you wanted, what was expected yet that's not how they felt? Let me ask it another way, how often do you feel frustrated because something wasn'...

Unless you are operating in some mystical nirvana the reality is at some point you are going to have rework in your organisation, you have rework because you have a non-conforming output and so ISO9001:2015 has some requirements for you to meet in order to ensure that you control these adequately. The other thing that tends to happen around non-con...

People never seem to pay attention or understand what's being said, why do I have to keep repeating myself? We have said that our culture is X or that our priority is Y it was perfectly clear! I hear this time and again from leaders at all levels in organisations so often I'm losing count. Frequently it's backed up with I've told people this, we me...

What is the signal within your organisation that your product or service is ready to be handed over to the customer? That is essentially the question that ISO9001:2015 is asking in Clause 8.6 – Release of Products and Services. Previously we have talked about verification and validation of your product or service to ensure that it meets the end use...

Lighthouses have got to be one of the most magical of buildings ever created, I love them. They stand against the mighty elements, the wind, the rain, the hail, the sun and everything else the environment has to throw at them. They stand firm, throwing out the vast illumination to light the way, showing where is safe and what isn't. The lighthouses...

Have you ever had one of those days when you are working through something you have done many times before only for someone to say, oh hey we changed how we do that, or we don't use those parts now we changed that? Frustrating isn't it? It's also pretty wasteful as it can create a bunch of rework or worse useless products or services no one wants o...

When people talk about lean there are so many areas that are discussed, there are of course all the tools – 5s, Kanban, load balancing (Heijunka), mistake proofing (poka-yoke) Root Cause analysis with things like fishbone diagrams, A3 problem solving, Andon systems, Gemba walks, Kaizen and so the list goes on, there is the history of it and what it...