The evidence I've seen, especially here in the Cove but also in my own work, is that certification has not reduced customer audits to any significant extent.
Which is my point--how many certificates do you think there would be if customers didn't require it? There would probably be none, because the number wouldn't support the market for CBs. If there is any value in ISO 9001--and I believe there is--the value is there for soccer clubs just as it is for other businesses, and the value in third-party auditing (having allegedly impartial review) is also there.
Working for a CB - in sales, as you probably know - I can vouch that even for our portion of the market there are a significant number of clients who do this for internal reasons, they like the discipline of having an auditor audit them - since they are not burdened by customer audits. In addition, they use to for attracting
potential customers who they didn't know and may/may not require it.
As you say,
you've seen no significant reduction in customer audits, but is the Cove truly a representative sample.......or just a vociferous few, or are you justifying your opinion by extrapolation??
Perhaps there are lack luster (by auditors or even unaccredited CBs) certifications, where customers have to audit their certified suppliers. There are plenty of organizations who justify why "ISO says" they have to audit suppliers, too, and have incorporated it in their procedures - which, of course they
must comply with themselves to maintain a certificate!
I'd prefer to see more data before I jumped to an assumption that certification wasn't beneficial and have some of the attendant issues surfaced and dealt with.
The normal protocol to quote and respond to a comment here is to place the quoted comment BEFORE your reply, not after. It is a much more logical way, which allows readers to read the comment you are responding to, before they read your reply.
