ISO9001:2015 your preparation for an assessment
· You need to prepare a system of documentation to meet the stated requirements of the ISO9001:2015 Standard. Although no longer a requirement of the standard we suggest that you develop a Quality Manual, which provides an overview of your organisation and processes.
· To meet the requirements of the standard you will need to identify “interested parties” and assess the risks posed by these interests. In other words look at what customers are looking for and how you meet these needs, what risks are associated with this and what risks are associated with other interested parties.
· There is also a requirement to identify and document the “context” of the organisation. These two initial parts of the standard help you to identify what factors affect your business and what level of control you have over them.
· The 2015 version of the standard has relaxed documentation requirements to some extent. This has always been a major gripe of users as the standard has been criticised for being too bureaucratic. However we would recommend you still maintain a Quality Manual and Operating Procedures. Our approach has always been to keep things simple and easy to understand.
· Preparing your system is relatively straight forward and put simply it means saying what you do.
· Once you have prepared your quality management documentation, you then need to implement your system i.e. do what you say by doing what you have stated in your quality management documentation.
· When you have fully implemented your quality management system, you can employ the services of an accredited certification body (one which is approved by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service UKAS) who will carry out an assessment of your quality management and its implementation to ascertain if you are meeting the requirements of the ISO9001 Standard.
· When your company has successfully demonstrated your compliance with the Standard, You will become a registered Company and a certificate to that effect will be awarded. In addition you will then be entitled to display on your premises, paperwork and vehicles, the so called Tick & Crown symbol which indicates to the World that you are a registered Company.
· You will benefit from employing the services of a consultant to assist with the preparation of your documentation and guidance on its implementation. In doing so you will avoid the stumbling blocks of your learning process and reduce the period of time taken to put your system in place.
· The use of Annex SL will allow management systems to meet multiple standards without the need to reproduce much of the content. issosmart™ is based on the Plan Do Check Act model and is already complaint with the requirements of Annex SL, meaning we have packages that are easily tailored to client’s needs and significantly reduces the cost of implementing multiple standards.
