Today, we reminisce on a situation we faced with a client a number of years ago… (Cue the flashback transition and the ethereal music).

As a consultancy which frequently deals with organizations looking to get ISO accredited, we often find ourselves making the same – but very important – point.

Don’t just make a management system. Don’t just have it. Engage with it and embrace it.

(Hmm… on second thoughts that sounds a little more romantic than intentioned…)

What do we mean by this? Well, as would be expected, many organizations get ISO accredited for the core purpose of having the ISO ‘stamp’ on their organization. This is key to securing more clients.

The problem is that so many organizations focus so much on just achieving accreditation, they forget the real purpose of getting ISO accredited: to make a tangible difference to your management system, such as your quality, environmental or health and safety management. Instead of engaging properly with their new management system, they quietly retain old informal practices and use their management system simply as a façade to display to the external auditor.

Making ISO MS Documents for the Sake of It

No better has such an approach been encompassed than with a manufacturer we engaged with a number of years ago. During the site visit, it was clear that things weren’t exactly as good as they could be. Elements of their operations, such as product / raw material traceability, communication and control of nonconforming products were weak. Not ideal but certainly nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly fixable.

The day after, we browsed the file structure of their management system, knowing this could help to unearth some underlying reasons behind the mismanagement, and so it did.

There were many documents, too many. This largely explained our findings during the site visit. When operational issues at the organization manifested, the response was simply to create a document say… “job done!” Traceability was poor because, instead of implementing meaningful corrective action to address the labelling of products and raw materials, a new document on traceability was created and plopped into the management system. In the eyes of those in charge, that was sufficient, but clearly it wasn’t. It echoed an “apply scotch tape to the wing of an aircraft to keep it in place” sort of approach.

Quite literally ‘papering over the cracks…’

Document Accessibility

Another consequence of this was that it made their file structure very messy. It became hard to find the items which really mattered as they were buried amongst documents which were about the documents related to the traceability document… for instance. You can see how this approach quickly came a feedback loop, making the management system more and more inefficient.

The key lesson here is to engage properly with your management system. This includes problems which require corrective action – make your corrective action meaningful. Creating wagonloads of unnecessary documents is nothing more than an ineffective correction that will actually make life more difficult in the long-run.

Sure, there are times when documents serve a purpose, but there are also times that other measures are required, such as, in the case of traceability problems, changes to your product labelling system, employee training and systems of communication between functions and levels.

Learning these lessons now may just save you a headache later down the line…