ISO Mistake #5

We often find that clients who have “standard specific”, let’s say “quality objectives”, believe these should be totally “quality” focused, with objectives aimed at things like error rates in production, or warranty return rates. These are excellent KPIs and can focus on improvement, but the term “quality objective” is just a business objective, essentially anything to improve the business. This could be a new piece of plant, additional resource in sales or production, or the outsourcing of internal audits to a most excellent consultancy (Statius), all of which have a real business benefit and are therefore perfectly acceptable as a “quality” objective.

All management system standards require you to have objectives and targets, but they should absolutely be subservient to the overall business objectives. The management system should be designed in a way that supports you and meets your business objectives, NOT the other way round.

Failure to adopt this approach will inevitably mean the system is sub-optimised and you are highly likely to, unwittingly, get to a position where the ISO system tail is wagging the business dog.

Remember, business first, standard second.