L
lean_machine
ISO 9000 certification and corporate performance
I'm back after an absence and I'd like to pick up where I left off on the subject of ISO 9000 certification and its benefit. Firstly, every study I've seen, including the Anderson School study, which purports to show benefit from CERTIFICATION is flawed. All these studies fail to disentangle implementation from certification and attribute any benefits resulting from implementing the system to the certification of the system. Certification is a verification of conformity to the ISO 9001:2000 requirements, nothing more. As such, by itself it probably adds little, if any, value to the process other than market recognition and satisfying customers that a QMS is in place. The direct internal performance benefit that accrues to the implementing organization from the certification process itself is therefore probably negligible and, taken in the context of cost-benefit analysis, provides little value-add to the overall business improvement process.
Secondly, until the ISO 9000:2000 series came out, most certifications to the 1994 edition were, as Dr Eicher of ISO rightly pointed out, fundamentally flawed as they had a major non-conformity: the lack of objectives, meaning there could be no effective system. I would add to this that certifying a documented system is as good as useless if the documented processes contain waste and variability. This gives a clue why certification is fundamentally and, in my opinion, fatally flawed: the objective for many firms is to get the badge on the wall rather than pursue real and meaningful improvement, which they can do without certification anyway.
I'm back after an absence and I'd like to pick up where I left off on the subject of ISO 9000 certification and its benefit. Firstly, every study I've seen, including the Anderson School study, which purports to show benefit from CERTIFICATION is flawed. All these studies fail to disentangle implementation from certification and attribute any benefits resulting from implementing the system to the certification of the system. Certification is a verification of conformity to the ISO 9001:2000 requirements, nothing more. As such, by itself it probably adds little, if any, value to the process other than market recognition and satisfying customers that a QMS is in place. The direct internal performance benefit that accrues to the implementing organization from the certification process itself is therefore probably negligible and, taken in the context of cost-benefit analysis, provides little value-add to the overall business improvement process.
Secondly, until the ISO 9000:2000 series came out, most certifications to the 1994 edition were, as Dr Eicher of ISO rightly pointed out, fundamentally flawed as they had a major non-conformity: the lack of objectives, meaning there could be no effective system. I would add to this that certifying a documented system is as good as useless if the documented processes contain waste and variability. This gives a clue why certification is fundamentally and, in my opinion, fatally flawed: the objective for many firms is to get the badge on the wall rather than pursue real and meaningful improvement, which they can do without certification anyway.