What does it mean “made in ISO 9001 Factory”?
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Replies
A management standards system to meet legal responsibilities. I guess the Factory is in compliance.
ISO 9001 is a widely recognized set of guidelines for a quality management program. They follow that set of guidelines.
It is a quality management certification, it does not necessarily have specific guidelines, it tells you to documents and apply the best practices you have used to provide a quality service and product and certifies your site once you demonstrate those systems and practices are followed.
The program is based on the International Standards Organization 9001 Standard, which sets forth criteria that must be addressed; it does not provide specifications, etc. The standard exists in various versions, depending on the type of operation. The standard for the facilities I assess is about 80 pages. The standard specifies the issues that must be documented and adhered to.
The certification is by a 3rd party organization that audits the facility on a regular schedule. The assessment (the correct term) looks at the organization, the operations documentation, staff competence, calibrations, maintenance and about a million other things.
Obtaining and maintaining ISO 9001 certification can be an exhausting and expensive process. It generally takes me 3 days to audit a fairly small facility.
And it took us up to a year to prepare before you came !
I did not mean to imply it is specific guidelines for a maunfacturing ptocess. I meant that it is a set of guidelines as to what you need in place for an ISO 9001 compliant quality assurance program. The program developed by the manufacturer is then certified by an external organization assuming it meets the ISO 9001 standard.
Question for the room:
As I understand it. ISO 9001 is more about paperwork than the product that is made in the facility. It doesn't mean a machine made in a ISO9001 facility is better than one that is not made in one. I've always thought of it as B2B marketing... the factory marketing themselves to a brand.
I find it silly that it's become a sticker applied to help sell machinery.
So, for the crowd that is further down this rabbit hole than me, do you find it silly for ISO9001 to be used in marketing geared towards consumers?
For having spent 20 years in manufacturing and implemented ISO 9001 in 3 plants, there is value in the certification and in maintaining it. If you see quality in the design and specs of a machine then ISO will not buy you anything but it will help ensure that the machine has been built with rigor over the years.
This is the type of answer I was fishing for. Thanks!
I would suggest you could think of it this way: ISO certification helps to ensure that the design/materials/parts and manufacturing processes used to build a machine to a required specification/customer expectation actually results more consistently in a machine that actually in fact does meet that spec/expectation, eg fewer defects/quality issues outside of tolerances/quality specifications (which might well be set lower (or higher) than other brands). ISO factories can produce premium products, but also can still build “cheap” tools and tools that fail or have issues because they were specified/ intended from beginning (by marketing geniuses and bean counters) to allow cheaper materials, larger tolerances for out of flat, out of square, rougher castings, lower polish or paint quality, part failures, etc - a certified organization just builds those cheap things more consistently and in theory at lower cost than non-certified because of ISO 9001 quality mgmt rigor. “Quality mgmt” is not about producing Lie Nielsen level of workmanship and customer delight - that’s a different use of the word “quality”, it’s about consistently producing to the spec whatever that might be. Using Grizzly selection of machines as an example, typically the machines from certified factories are more feature rich, on the higher end and seem (to me) to have some extra cost for that higher “quality”. IMO I’d prefer and pay a little more for a machine from certified factory - to me it’s an assurance that the tool is less likely to be a lemon.
ISO 9001 basically means that the manufacturer has demonstrated to ISO that it makes its parts in a highly repeatable fashion, producing parts that are repeatably the same. It says nothing, as far as I know, about how precise those parts are. In other words, I believe you can be ISO 9000 and produce parts that are all +- 0.001", but you could also produce parts that are only +-0.1" because the process and materials only yield that. But they are "identical" in that tolerance.
In other words, not a useless certification, but not actually a mark of "quality" in the ordinary everyday sense.