Automotive Quality Systems Handbook, 2nd Edition

84 Perceptions of ISO 9000 and its derivatives

The approach to certification

Believing that ISO 9000 was only about ‘documenting what you do’, organizations set to

work on responding to the requirements of the standard as a list of activities to be carried

out. Again, this belief became so widespread that ISO co-ordinators or ISO 9000 project

managers were appointed to establish and maintain the quality system. In some organ-

izations, managers were assigned responsibility for meeting the requirements of a par-

ticular element of the standard even though there was not only no requirement to do so,

but also no business benefit from doing so. Consultants were engaged to write the docu-

ments and apart from some new procedures governing internal audits, management

review and document control, very little changed. There was a lot of money thrown

at these projects in the quest to gain certification. However, none of the surveys con-

ducted since 1987 have shown any significant improvement in an organization’s overall

performance – quite simply because nothing changed, not the processes, not the people

nor the culture. The ‘system’ existed just to keep the badge on the wall. The ninth ISO

survey

2

indicated that 9862 certificates had been withdrawn at the end of 1999 and of

these 473 were for reasons of either insufficient return on investment or no business

advantage. However some 7186 organizations discontinued certification for reasons

unknown, indicating that certification was probably perceived as not adding value.

The approach to auditing

To make matters worse, the certification scheme established to assess the capability of

organizations perpetuated this belief. These third-party auditors would reinforce the

message by commencing their interviews with the question “Have you got a procedure

for … ?” Audits would focus on seeking evidence that the organization was implement-

ing its procedures – this technique was not limited to ISO 9001 assessments, it also per-

vaded QS-9000 assessments. Desperate to put the ‘badge on the wall’ organizations

responded to the auditor’s expectations and produced quality manuals that mirrored

the structure of the standard – manuals containing nothing more than the requirements

of Section 4 of ISO 9001 or ISO 9002, reworded as policy statements. (It is sadly no

different with QS-9000 and ISO/TS 16949 certification. You only have to scour the

Internet and alight on ISO/TS 16949 Quality Manuals following the clauses of

the standard.) The auditor would therefore establish an organization’s readiness for the

audit by the closeness with which the quality manual addressed the requirements of the

standard rather than by examining performance. A more sensible approach might

have been to ask for the last 3 months, data for the key processes to establish if the

processes were stable. Four years after the publication of ISO 9001:2000, whilst the

habit of asking for a documented procedure is declining, there is little evidence that

asking for performance data has yet become a habit.

Instead of using the whole family of standards as a framework, the standards became

a stick with which to beat people. Managers would ask, where does it say that in the

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