In recent tools catalogs often appears a line stating that the tool has been manufactured in a ISO 9001 or 9002 Facility.
Could anyone explain which standards the factory must meet to obtain that certification, and are those standards related to the ultimate quality of the tools or reflects things such as adequate ventilation, clean floors etc.
Thank you for educating me.
John Cabot
Replies
ISO stands for International Standards Organization. They are a body which writes standards for all sorts of industry. Similar to other organizations such as ANSI, ASME, IEEE, NEC, etc.
The ISO standards you refer to are quality system standards. In other words, operations which conform to those standards have certain rigorous quality systems in place. The quality systems cover such areas as having written procedure for work activities, calibration of equipment, lot traceability, method for responding to customer complaints, incoming inspection of supplier's materials, and so forth. The one key area is that it is not a standard for product quality. The theory is that if an operation has in place good quality systems, then a quality product follows.
Certification is done by a multi-day inspection by a team of inspectors authorized by ISO to issue the certification.
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/iso9000-14000/index.html
ISO 9001 certification is a good idea if you want to deal internationally. The standards are very high (and some would say unnecessarily bureaucratic). The US is the only country I know of that doesn't recognize an ISO certification.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
President Dwight Eisenhower
http://costofwar.com/
I don't understand what you mean by the US "not recognizing" ISO certification. Many US companies are ISO certified, and a number of US companies require their key suppliers to be ISO certified.
Just that it's not a federally recognized credential. Lots of private companies do recognize it.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
President Dwight Eisenhower
http://costofwar.com/
Right!
Your are absolutely right. The one key item that is not considered at all is the product quality. For me as a consumer this is what's most important. Basically what ISO 9.... guaranties is that the company produces it's product (or service) in a consistent way; either good or bad !!! The rules of the procedures to follow are made by the individual company itself (there are some minimum requirements). ISO only checks that you follow your own rules.
Being part of a ISO certified company I personally wouldn't give sh** about whether or not a company has ISO. The only thing I know is that they have more overhead costs which are included in the cost of the product. Don't forget also that the external auditors are paid by the company that wants the certification. The initial certification procedure is tough because you have to produce all these procedures. But after that the auditors don't seem to investigate to deeply (in order not to loose business?).
The simple thing is that all companies (starting with the big OEMs) that have ISO 9.... will require that suppliers also have ISO 9.... so in this way there is no escape.
My previous experience leads me to agree with Free. What ISO does is confirm that you build a product, or perform a service, exactly the way you say that you do. The idea being that there will be product consistency - always good, or always bad... ;-)
Ed,
I guess I have a slightly diferent take than you and Free...at least in the short run. Like the old saying 'you can't imporve what you can't measure' ISO helps provide information for improving outcomes....of course, if the information isn't used then it's worse than a waste of time.
The ISO process can provide insights into operational improvements....which greatly helps emerging companies in China and the like where a whole lot of manufacturing expertise does not exist. As important, it can help workers communicate with the dopes in management what is actually going on...lol
The technical answers follw from others, but what these standards are supposed to drive at is repeatability - the cheap dud tool will be just as much a dud next time. Equally so a good tool.
We have an interesting system here where many government departments demanded ISO 9001 QA, and then specified small to medium Australian enterprises. The compliance cost makes this an oxymoron, and a boon to international companies becomming a front and subcontracting the work to local SME.
>>The technical answers follw from others, but what these standards are supposed to drive at is repeatability - the cheap dud tool will be just as much a dud next time. Equally so a good tool.
Not quite true. Within the ISO standards are requirements that the process drives a "meets requirements" and a continual improvement. A prime driver of continual improvement is a documented response process to customer satisfaction or complaints. If the customer wants "dud" tools and it meets the customer requirements, then all is good. However, if the customer complains, then the process drives an improvement process.Howie.........
Howie - Are you saying that if I write to an ISO 9xxx approved company complaining about one of their products it will automatically initiate an investigation and a reply to me?
All ISO certification means is that your process is documented and you follow that process and have a means for improving the process. If the process is "whack it with a hammer until it goes in", OK, thats the process and its documented. Means nothing so far as quality. I know a good few companies who are certified and produce garbage. Its just certified garbage. I did the certification package for a fairly incompetent government contractor. No more competent the day after being certified than the day before. But, they have a nice set of binders on the shelf now with the certified process safely inside.
Your approved customer service process will not result in a reply unless they wrote the process as such. Their process may be to toss your complaint in the trash. ISO inspectors do not judge the process. Just whether it is documented and you do it.
maybe a company will react to customer complaint if you bought 1000 saw or whatever, but for woodworking equipment, they probably won't go through anything that the usual warranty process doesn't take care of.
"...they probably won't go through anything that the usual warranty process doesn't take care of."
An ISO 9000 registered company will eventually use the warranty information to improve their quality level. Hopefully as a normal course of business, if not they will when that portion of their Quality System is audited...or stand to lose their certification. Especially under the new ISO 9000-2000 standard which changes the core focus of ISO from simply documenting what you do and following that documentation, to what the customer wants/expects.
Also, please note that the word "Quality" is not in the accronym ISO. ISO-9000 is a Business Management tool. So few leaders in business realize that.
Edited 10/26/2004 1:54 pm ET by Wannafish
NO, you might be regarded as an abberation if they are treating complaints under a statistical review approach. LOL
This Quality discussion is all at serious risk of the participants being in violent agreement with each other.
OK, here is a slight, not "violent" disagreement.
Because we live in North America and often don't consider what takes place beyond our boundaries, we don't adhere much value to things such as International Standards, making products compatible around the globe. We still live in inches, pounds, unique gallons and Engineering units which makes simple design calculations, complicated. Some of our cars still today have a combination of metric and imperial components, requiring an odd selection of tools.
If we had to follow this practice in a small country such as the Netherlands, Germany or Sweden, and expect our products and services to sell Globally, we would be dead overnight.
Here is a link, explaining why ISO is important, specially beyond our borders.
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/aboutiso/introduction/index.html#one
Jellyrug
You live in North America, I'm Australian and working for an american company that regards 'letter' as the international standard for paper because some of its staff actually dont know about metric (we have made the mistake of asking).
I agree absolutely about the need for standards and 'interoperability' my only beef about ISO 9000 quality standards is the compliance costs. All of the blokes here will tell you about the importance of knowing all of your costs - that is just quality at work at a practical level. Over here we have some very good small companies that utilise internation standards (otherwise they would have to build their own components) but dont bother bidding for even small government work because of the QA compliance costs.
On the other hand, the company I work for does a nice buiness providing top cover - its called system integration.
Actually, my favoutite standardisation story is attached to my first car, a 1954 MGTF. The engine on this beast was assembled with a thread type known as Nuffield's mad metric. Lord Nuffield - the boss of Morris - decided that he wanted to move to the modern metric age, so he adpoted the French metric thread standard; but, he knew that most 1950's mechanics would only have whitworth or BS tools so the bolt heads are all sized to that standard. Try finding parts for that!!
We had a discussion about this back in fall of 2003, rather heated I recall <g>. Here's a link to ISO "plain English" section:
http://www.praxiom.com/iso-9001.htm
forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
Another proud member of the "I Rocked With ToolDoc Club" .... :>)
Lot's of good answers here. But let me boil it down to answer your specific question from what I have seen. ISO does not imply a specific level of quality in the final product per se. I have worked for two companies as they sought for and obtained ISO 9xxx and QS 9xxx certification. We within the company decided the level of quality that we would produce to. One of the primary requirements of ISO was to document what we were already doing.
As a manufacturing engineer I have found ISO to be a waste of money. We used to joke that you could build a lead life preserver and be ISO certified as long as they were consistently built the same.
From the firms that I have worked with in the past I have found that some of the best companies will never go for ISO. Usually I am told that they feel that their company name is all of the certification that they need. Some owners I have met rather have Nader as the president than have ISO. That statement made the dinner conversation perk up.
Personally I rather see a system that emphasizes quality and continuos improvement. Documentation is important but there are more important things in manufacturing. I also have to admit that I an biased, I am paid for my knowledge and solving problems so why should I give away all of my secrets. Job security comes with some things being held back.
You will never see a small company get ISO certification, at least that has been my experience. The costs are just to high! At a previous employer we spent over $60,000 a year on certification audits and that was just for one plant.
The Germans started ISO during WWII according to my understanding. Since they would have plants bombed on a regular basis they found that having through documentation of every operation and job they could move a manufacturing operation or replace a killed worker easily. Actually there is some pretty good documentation of this in the Cosmosphere Museum in Hutchinson Kansas.
Johncabot,
Interesting discussions under this topic.
Basically, the international community has accepted ISO 9000 (1,2) as the accepted standard for an organization, to be able to produce a quality product, consistently.
Because the US is so big and is such a large economic power, it has not supported ISO 9000 as much as the rest of the world. I worked for Coca-Cola for 11 years and they implemented the Coca-Cola quality system, which they believe is better than ISO, but basically it comes down to the same thing. For any organization, who exports their products abroad ISO becomes very important, as it is a big thing in Europe.
What this means to you, is that an ISO 9000 factory, is well structured and has quality systems in place. You can therefore have more faith in the quality of their products.
I have noticed under this discussion, that the definition of "quality" is not well understood. Basically, the first pioneer in the US, to publish a lot of material and promote it professionally was Philip Crosby in 1979, this was the start of the big "Total Quality Management" thing here in the US. It was in line with big competition from Japan, who mastered quality manufacturing. You can look this up under http://www.philipcrosby.com Today, in North America, the latest buzzwords are "Six Sigma" and "Lean Manufacturing".
While all the above material refers to quality systems, ISO 9000 is the only accepted formal international standard.
In my view, Japan are still the leaders in Industry quality, as their products show less defects than any others. Some of the woodworking machines coming from Asian factories, with ISO 9001 certification and US design management, as well as quality control are producing better value than anyone else, by a long shot.
Jellyrug
In my experience, from almost 15 years working with what was once the largest US steel producer and a few other metals companies combined, ISO guarantees us nothing when it comes to tool quality and design.
ISO standards dictate mostly document control, supplier control, calibration of measurement systems, management review of quality data and some other quality systems subjects. It was and still is big on documentation and record keeping (quality records) - but not always how good or explanatory those procedures are. Many I have seen are vague. It was revamped a few years ago, after which I have had less to do with ISO 9001:2000. In my opinion, it is a colossal waste of time and money and a huge scam. Companies that undertake this must undergo a biannual quality systems review by an quality auditor from the registrar company they deal with and it is not free. I have never encountered an audititor who understood anything of consequence about making steel, titanium, or probably anything else for that matter, and most had no clue about how thermocouples, optical pyrometers, x-ray gauges, and other measurement equipment worked and was supposed to be calibrated. All they could do was audit procedures and compliance to them. Most of them never really spent any amount of time watching the process to make sure it was done according to the written procedures. There was a good saying about that - A company could be certified that made cement life jackets, as long as they followed all of the procedures, everybody had the correct revision of documentation, and whatever they measured with had a calibration stamp. With ISO 9001:2000, that has changed somewhat but not the effectiveness or knowledge of the auditors.
There is also something of a conflict of interest with the whole registration/ certification process, in that the company must pay the registrar to audit and certify them, in my opinion. There are a whole bunch of registrars out there, some worse and some better than others, so if a registrar fails or is too tough on a business, what is to stop the business from getting an easier registrar? The businesses pay out a lot of money, so why should a registrar make them mad?
In my opinion, a well run business doesn't need ISO to improve quality, because they will do the things ISO calls for and more - because poor quality is often money left of the table, in terms of things like yield, first time pass, cycle time, customer satisfaction, and more. A good set of managers or owners will do these things and people/customers will come to them based on word of mouth and reputation, and sometimes with earnings statement and if they can expand and re-invest.
So after all that, ISO does not mean you are getting a well designed and well built tool. It only means you are getting a tool that was built to a set of plans and with a select group of parts, etc. The parts could be inadequate for the task, and the design not as good as another companies.
... a well run business doesn't need ISO to improve quality, because they will do the things ISO calls for and more - because poor quality is often money left of the table, in terms of things like yield, first time pass, cycle time, customer satisfaction, and more
have to agree with you. Last time I asked, Toyota was not ISO certified.
the best explanation of the efficacy of ISO 9000 certification is the certification obtained by the manufacturer of concrete life jackets. All the jackets were built in accordance with the documented process, and none of the customers ever complained !
Ian
ISO 9001 certification is suited to organisations who wish to improve their management processes and demonstrate that their quality credentials are independently verified. This usually leads to improved client retention and helps them win new business, particularly when bidding for public sector work where ISO 9001 is usually expected.
Thanks!!!
For more information visit: ISO 9001
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