Hello Quality Pros:

I need your input about the following issue:
A company is growing internally as is evidenced by the addition of new machinery(presses) due to customers' demand of the product, hiring of new personnel, also top management is expending moderately $ in providing resources for safety improvements, and internal growth due to increased customers business.

I see a continual improvement in the efficiency of the org to provided product which tells me that customer satisfaction is good, the question is how can the company take credit for the above growth about their improvements, what metric or requirements in ISO 9K2k should should reflect and take credit to show the auditors. Shall there be a list of the the improvements to show the auditor? I would be interested to know what reqs are being met and provide a couple of ideas as to what metrics could be applicable in this case. The company's overall corp objectives are:
Quality product
On time delivery
Thanks,

First of all I would refer you to ISO 9004, particularly Annex B, which will give you some guidelines.

As your objectives relate to product quality and on time delivery, can you produce evidence that the ppm rate, on time delivery performance, freight costs (especially premium freight), lead times etc are improving?

You are investing in new equipment but can you demonstrate improvements in productivity, profitability, lower costs etc?

What information is coming out of your analysis of customer complaints, management review and internal audits?
Does this demonstrate improvements in any areas?

It has been stated many times in these forums that you shouldn't worry too much about producing records just for the auditors. Get the metrics to give yourself and the management team confidence that what you are doing is improving the organization's performance and this will allow you to target future improvement projects. It will also, as a side benefit, satisfy the auditors.

...addition of new machinery(presses) due to customers' demand of the product, hiring of new personnel, also top management is expending moderately $ in providing resources for safety improvements, and internal growth due to increased customers business.

Those are all improvements.

Note that in some cases, such as a small, stable company, where the processes are simple (such as mixing sugar and water, just to make a simple example), you may have a problem coming up with continuous improvement examples. I have small clients like this where the processes are so simple that there's really nothing they can improve. They cite improvements in other systems, such as moving from a paper system for certain documents to a computer database.

Another eaxmple: I had a client which was a trucking company which had 97% on-time delivery. In transportation that's pretty good. At first it took the auditor a while to understand that there wasn't much (anything) they could do to improve the metic. But they did do things to improve. For example, they installed GPS units in their trucks and gave each driver a cell phone with a 'walkie-talkie function. They didn't improve the on-time metric, but were a plus in keeping customers informed of shipment status and were a general communications improvement.

Here is my take on continual improvement


According to ISO 9001,

8.5.1 Continual improvement

The organization shall continually improve the effectiveness of the quality management system through the use of the quality policy, quality objectives, audit results, analysis of data, corrective and preventive actions
and management review.



Remember, ISO is about QMS, not products (which is a part of QMS)

If you have and use all of the above mentioned items, you have continual improvement!!!!...all the things you have mentioned (new equip/new employees, etc) can be associated with any one of above items.


e.g. quality objective = improved product quality ---> by purchasing new equip.

We require our department managers to set objectives annually. We then set a target of the objective and track the results through the management review meetings. For example:
1. Customer Complaints are tracked by department and an objective may be set to decrease the amount of complaints by some %. The result is not always positive. Continual improvement can be shown by finding out why we were unsuccessful and taking corrective action(s) that will turn the results into positive results.

2. The Customer Satisfaction index at our company has stagnated at 94%. We are taking measures to try and jump over this level we have attained. We found a direct relationship to our outside sales staff not providing enough "love" to certain customers. They weren't keeping in touch frequently enough. We found 48 instances of this through our telephone surveys. We took action to visit and call these customers more frequently. We will see what happens the next time we survey these customers???

3. Even minor changes to our processes and procedures are communicated at the review meetings and we consider these improvements.

Dont' worry about the auditor, find out what you need to improve on for the good of your company and improve in those areas.