8 replies to this topic

[Simon]

If you have opinions about ISO 9000 you should take a look at the 'Open Space' gatherings, the result of a collaboration between BSI (British Standards Institution), Orange plc and The Business Improvement Network.

The OSG's will take place in London September and Birmingham October.

Download Open Space Flyer

I will be at Birmingham - let me know if you plan to go.

Simon

[Simon]

I attended the Open Space gathering last week along with about 60 of my fellow Quality Professionals who were from a diverse range of manufacturing, service and public sector organisations. I must say it was a really excellent day, the venue (Orange Studio, Birmingham) is superb, the people were great, the food was magnificent and the Open Space format was tremendous - so not bad all in all!

The topic for the day was

'How can we get more value from ISO 9000?'

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the 'open space' format there is no agenda and no formal presentations - it's basically a free for all but with structure.

I was asked to think about ISO 9000 prior to the day, which I duly did on the train journey down (motion is supposed to be good for creativity - I learned this at OS).

I started to think about the behemoth that is ISO 9000?

ISO 9000 is truly an international standard costing billions of pounds to industry and supporting the consultancy, training and certification industries worldwide. The aim of the standard is to help organisations to improve and hopefully to generate increased market share, revenue profit etc. - but in reality does it? Has it now not just become a necessary but expensive overhead that buyers and contract awardees blindly require of their suppliers?

Rightly or wrongly in the early days of BS 5750 or ISO 9000 organisations holding the badge was held in high esteem they differentiated themselves - nowadays it's so what!

It was in this context that I had the idea. What if we took the best bits of the EFQM Business Excellence Model or Baldridge i.e. the scoring system and applied it to ISO 9000?

I believe if you could take the ISO 9004 document and develop an intelligent scoring system for every damn clause it contains then you would have a superb continual improvement tool. You could still have the mandatory requirements (ISO 9001) that all organisations would have to achieve a pass mark in, but for the more proactive organisations they would be able to eat away at all the best practice contained within ISO 9004. And they would be able to show it! Whereas now Backstreet Bob and Worldclass Willy are ISO 9000 Registered with a scoring system you could differentiate and say I'm ISO 9000 (127pts) or alternatively ISO 9000 (976pts) or somewhere in between.

What an incentive for improvement?there's no doubt it would generate senior management buy in and through a central database you could benchmark organisations internationally - Wow!

Why not just use the EFQM Excellence Model or Baldridge I hear you ask? Well ISO 9000 (bless it's cotton socks) is International and is the perfect vehicle to deliver it.

I ended up doing an ad hoc presentation on the above to 4 people at OS and they all agreed that the idea was sound. The question from everyone was how can this and the other ideas that were generated on the day be taken forward to the people that matter.

Well a letter signed by all attendees will be winging its way to ISO TC/176TS (the people that wrote the standard) shortly and some of us will also be having a go at developing a scoring system for ISO 9004.

Do you think it's a good or bad idea? I will post updates as they become available.

Simon

[rheath]

I like the idea as there is nothing better than a scoring system to motivate improvement.

I also like the idea as I have worked my ass off to truly enhance our business in line with the ethos of the new standard & it does deflate me when I go to some businesses and see what has been agreed as acceptable to the minimum requirement.

The main difficulty I can see with a scoring system is with our good friends the auditors. No matter how prescriptive or clearly laid out a standard is, it is always down to an individuals interpretation.

Within our group we have benchmark audits on Health & Safety. The only way this works well is to have one auditor visiting all sites, a qualative statement is added to all the quantative measures which enables benchmarking to be interpreted far more easily.

As an example of what I mean by this is ; the quantative question may be COSHH sheets available at points of use Yes = 1 Point ; No = 0 Point.

What if a site does not have any COSHH registered chemicals, do we mark 0 because there are no records at point of use or 1 because chemicals are controlled & company should not be penalised. By marking 1 does this then mean that the site should have training records on COSHH even though they do not have any chemicals etc etc..

The obvious difficulty within ISO is that one auditor could not complete all audits in one year (unless they are related to Father Christmas!)

The other main drawback of a scoring system is that it can have a negative effect on profitability & efficiency where maximisation of scoring is the goal.

In the early days, we were previously accredited to the AIB scheme for packaging. This had a scoring system. Memory fails me of precise detail but I thing it was out of 1000 points. 600 points was acceptable, 700 good, 800 Very Good, 900+ Excellent.

There was a customer challenge which our MD did not want to fail, as such loads of resource, time effort and money want spent on this and we achieved an excellent rating within 12 months (the first in the UK to do this).

Wonderful we say.. The only difficulty was to maintain this level of resource & commitment was practically impossible, more over, a lot of the requirements (in the excellent rating) were not needed for our industry or risk level so we were needlessly spending money.

If within the standard we can over come these problems great, just glad I'm not writing it.. I'll just sit back and bitch as usual.. B)

Regards

Rich

[Simon]

I have worked my ass off to truly enhance our business in line with the ethos of the new standard & it does deflate me when I go to some businesses and see what has been agreed as acceptable to the minimum requirement.

Yeah good points Richard thanks for that.

That's the whole point certification to ISO 9001 is just 'on' or 'off' or as Jim Wade would say 'binary' - it's just not right and I cannot believe that there isn't a better way. Maybe scoring isn't it because of the many problems mentioned both in the other forum and by you; but at least it's an idea. Maybe the only two choices either now or in the future are knuckle down and just do the best you can in your own organisation or drop the certificate. It's a joke though isn't it?

I think I must be feeling a little down this afternoon.

Simon

By the way have you or are you going to submit your details for the BRC/IoP register?

[rheath]

By the way have you or are you going to submit your details for the BRC/IoP register?

Give me chance, Ive only just finished that essay, and am half way through the new submission.

You should have all the details through by now..

I agree there must be a better way of recognising the differences in businesses, the only difficulty is that it invariably will mean more work in proving it, less time spent actually improving.

Thats why generally I dont sign up for quality competitions.

Any way, going home now as I feel lousy, hense the time spent pondering and doing no work... <_<

[Simon]

I recommend a large hot toddy (plenty of brandy), 4 paracetamols a hot water bottle and a comfortable bed. Get well soon and we'll see you later.

[Paul Brandist]

I attended the BIN/BSI/Orange Open Space event with Simon and Jim and am one of those guys Simon refers to as being interested in forming a working team to develop a draft scoring framework that could be applied to ISO 9000:2000.

I think this is a 'roll up your sleeves' and give it a go type of exercise - if we turn ISO 9001 requirements into 'criterion' we may be able to create statements with which to apply a modified RADAR scorecard to?

We could start with ISO 9001 and move onto non-requirement elements of ISO 9004 if we think it is going well.

I think the principles of apply a systematic scoring methodology (e.g. RADAR) to a set of clear requirement statements (e.g. criteria) is sound. How it would look and read ... we shall find out!!

Does anyone agree ... and is anyone intersted in rolling up their sleeves and getting stuck in?

Paul Brandist
Kinsgton Communications

[Simon]

Hi Paul,

Very pleased you could join us. As you know I'm interested and I think that your right to start with 9001 as this would provide a useful indicator for the bigger and better plan (and it will be easier).

Simon

[Jim Wade]

Good to see you here, Paul!

I'll be in touch with you and Simon next week about next steps - I acquired some new information today from an unexpected source that I think is relevant and will interest you.

Another piece in the jigsaw is the interview in October's Quality World with the top men at UKAS - the people who overseee the certification bodies. UKAS CEO Paul Stennett says...

"change ... may be necessary sometime in the future. Hopefully through that, it starts to be a beneficial circle that demands UKAS and other internationally-recognised accreditation bodies to supply what the market wants. It won't happen overnight, but we can plant the seeds of looking to do that now".

A socket for our plug?

rgds Jim

PS here you both are planting seeds in Birmingham (Simon centre, Paul just visible) with colleagues from LRQA, Siemens, Orange etc.