Increasingly businesses are finding that there are major benefits to be had by working to a formal Quality Management System that ensures that their work processes will help to provide a consistent product or service and which helps them to improve overall. A well-implemented system reduces the need for constant checking and supervision and can free up staff for more productive work. Many businesses register their Quality Management System to ISO9001, the International Standard for Quality Assurance.

In this past a major driver for this has been market and client pressure, such systems were effectively put in under duress and in many cases failed to provide the business with the advantages that it was expecting. The old joke about “consistently producing rubbish” is well known in industry.

ISO 9001:2008, the current version of the standard is designed for use in the modern world and actively encourages the business to continually improve its products and processes. This change in focus ensures that a properly designed and implemented system will not only suit your business, imposing little in the way of unnecessary paperwork, it will also add value and aid you in your endeavours to improve the effectiveness of your operation.

The Process Approach: The current ISO 9000:2008 standards promote the adoption of a process approach when devising, implementing and improving a quality management system (QMS). The process approach acknowledges that a desired result is achieved more efficiently when activities and related resources are managed as a process. ISO 9001:2008 stresses the importance for an organization to identify, implement, manage and continually improve the effectiveness of the processes that are necessary for the quality management system, and to manage the interactions of these processes in order to achieve the organization's objectives.