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Forum: ISO 9000 Forum: Sign the Petition to "Reverse the Worldwide Decline of ISO 9001"
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Posted by Roderick Goult on Friday, February 20, 2004 - 3:29 am:
I have been reading this correspondance with interest and some concern. The concern stems firstly from the fact that I suggest YYYYYYYYY is actually seriously misinterpreting the data concerning ISO 9001 certifications. He quotes, as an example, a 'decline'in certification growth in the USA from 53% to 10% between 1993 and 2003, and then uses this extremely dubious statistic to predict that there will actually be a decline in certifications starting very shortly.
Well, let's consider the facts rather than emotive interpretations of the facts. Now I don't actually have discrete numbers in front of me, not being in my office, but having been involved in the ISO world in the USA since 1990, I can state with certainty that in 1993 there were but a relative handful of certified companies in the country. There are now over 60,000. I shall seek confirmation of the actual data from QSU and post it once it is received.
When the number is small, a 53% increase is easy. As the number gets larger, the absolute number of certificates may grow, but the percentage increase go down. This is the simple fact of what has happened, not a decline. It actually reflects the current capacity of the accredited certification industry.
Add to that a number of companies (not small) which have not upgraded their QS-9000/ISO 9001 or 9002 certification because they are transitioning to TS16949, then consider those doing the same transition from ISO 9001 to ISO 13485, and the overall picture is nothing like the gloomy prognostications from YYYYYYYYY. Interpreting data is always a risky business.
On the subject of binary certification raised by another author, remember the Crosby definition of quality - conformance to specification.
Sytem certifiation is by definition binary, just like product certification - you either meet the requirement or you don't. If you want to perpetuate the quality profession's greatest sin, subjective squishy-squashy niceness and 'better than' stuff, then play with quality awards.
Leave the simplistic starkness of management systems alone. At the end of the day the effectiveness of a QMS comes from, as several have stated, the implementation process driven by management commitment.
The moment you have auditors making value judgements on the 'goodness' of systems they will become another failure, adding yet again to the litter of quality initiative failures which make up the history of quality in the second half of the 20th century. There can be no clearer indication of this than the decline in applications for, and use of, the Baldrige award over the past ten years.
