The original question was about REGISTRATION. Not the standard. Not the implementation.
Yes. And without starting the evidence-of-value-of-registration discussion again (some of which can been seen in
this protracted discussion), I'll offer a tale of two companies from my own experience:
Company number one was a QS-9000 registered firm with which the company I worked for at the time was doing business. I was dispatched to go there and review some quality issues and "walk the process" for a particular part they made for us.
In an initial meeting upon my arrival, the particulars of what I hoped to accomplish were discussed, and it was clear to me that the meeting participants were bright, knowledgeable, and had a firm understanding of the requirements. I had previously reviewed the relevant written documentation, including the quality manual, and was happy with what I saw.
To avoid the appearance of conducting a formal audit, I had decided not write anything down during my trip through the plant. Unfortunately, I quickly began seeing serious issues, and it wasn't long before I realized I wouldn't be able to remember all of them. Tooling that was supposed to identified as to status wasn't; ditto for inspection status of bins of parts on the production floor--some was not identified at all, some was misidentified; there was a real-time SPC system with monitors at all of the machines, but I got three completely different explanations of how it worked from three different individuals, including the quality manager...
In short, almost none of what I had seen in the documentation had actually been implemented on the firing line, and it was unambiguously clear that a credible system was nowhere to be seen. Nonetheless, there was that lovely certificate hanging on the lobby wall.
Company #2 was a large, privately-held firm with multiple manufacturing facilities. Like company #1, my company was doing business with it, only in this case everything was hunky-dory, and my visit was just a getting-to-know-you exercise. The company was not ISO-registered. During the course of a two-day visit I saw the main corporate offices and three of the plants, as well a central lab facility. The most striking thing to me was that in moving from one plant to another, it was impossible to tell that they were separated by, in once case, 100 miles. There was an obvious atmosphere of consistency of purpose and continuity of policies, processes and procedures. In each plant, while I was being guided along, a department manager interrupted us and asked my guide (a salesperson) to make sure that I was brought into his area so he could show me the work being done. Everyone seemed genuinely glad to see me, and proud of what they were doing.
At one point, in a chat with one of the plant managers, I said that I couldn't help but notice that the company wasn't ISO-registered, and asked why that was. "Well," he replied, "we were thinking of doing it, but we have all these different facilities, which would make it a long and expensive process, and in the end we decided that we didn't need to pay to have auditors come in and tell us what we already know, and what our customers already know."
