Continual improvement in the quality management In ISO 9001

Continual improvement in the quality management system and its processes In ISO 9001

The standard requires the organization to continually improve the effectiveness of the quality management system in accordance with the requirements of ISO 9001 and to implement action necessary to achieve planned results andcontinual improvement of the identified processes.

ISO 9000 defines continual improvement as a recurring activity to increase the ability to fulfil requirements. As the organization’s objectives are its requirements, continually improving the effectiveness of the management system means continually increasing the ability of the organization to fulfil its objectives.

This requirement responds to the Continual Improvement principle. If the management system is enabling the organization to accomplish its objectives when that is its purpose, why improve? The need for improvement arises out of a need to become more effective at what you do, more efficient in the utilization of resources so that the organization becomes best in its class. The purpose of measuring process performance is to establish whether or not the objectives are being achieved and if not to take action on the difference. If the performance targets are being achieved, opportunities may well exist to raise standards and increase efficiency and effectiveness.

If the performance of a process parameter is currently meeting the standard that has been established, there are several improvement actions you can take:
Raise the standard e.g. if the norm for the sales ratio of orders won to all orders bid is 60%, an improvement programme could be developed for raising the standard to 75% or higher
Increase efficiency e.g. if the time to process an order is within limits, identify and eliminate wasted resources Increase effectiveness e.g. if you bid against all customer requests, by only bidding for those you know you can win you improve your hit rate

You can call all these actions improvement actions because they clearly improve performance. However, we need to distinguish between being better at what we do now and doing new things. Some may argue that improving efficiency is being better at what we do now, and so it is – but if in order to improve efficiency we have to be innovative we are truly reaching new standards. Forty years ago, supervisors in industry would cut an eraser in half in the name of efficiency rather than hand out two erasers. Clearly this was a lack of trust disguised as efficiency improvement and it had quite the opposite effect. In fact they were not only increasing waste but also creating a hostile environment.

Each of the improvement actions is dealt with later in the book and the subject of continual improvement addressed again under Quality planning in Chapter 5. There are several steps to undertaking continual improvement (Juran, J. M., 1995)12 .
1 Determine current performance
2 Establish the need for change
3 Obtain commitment and define the improvement objectives
4 Organize diagnostic resources
5 Carry out research and analysis to discover the cause of current
performance
6 Define and test solutions that will accomplish the improvement
objectives
7 Product improvement plans which specify how and by whom the changes
will be implemented
8 Identify and overcome any resistance to change
9 Implement the change10 Put in place controls to hold new levels of performance and repeat step one.