Thanks Turtle, I've often wondered about the ISO thing, and you have captured the essence of what it's all about in a short enough explanation for an average joe like me to be bothered reading.
Thanks
I used to have an obviously false belief that co's who were ISO certified had achieved something of significance, and hence the big poster scrolls hanging on their facilities to announce it, as if it were a huge deal.
I see now that it could be for something fairly everyday and mundane.
Well, the mere fact that one can consider these things everyday and mundane is a testament to how well the ISO standards work. Being
ISO 9001:2000 (soon to be replaced with the updated
ISO 9001:2008 version) is kind of a big deal, really, especially as a part of the overall supply chain. Yeah, a lot of the things that the ISO Standard spells out is routine, mundane, common sense, but without having all these things spelled out in a systematic way, some or all of them may end up being applied to customers in wildly varying ways, if at all. To a customer, it means that their supplier has established a
systematic approach to quality management, and is managing its business to ensure that your needs are clearly understood, agreed and fulfilled. It about consistency in quality, and about the systematic approach to improving quality. And if you have a problem, it ensures that the problem will be addressed in a specifically outlined, systematic manner. A statement of conformity to
ISO 9001:2000 should not, however, be considered as a substitute for a declaration or statement of product or service conformity. Meaning, it might not be resolved to your satisfaction, but you can be assured that it will, absolutely, be addressed in the proper manner and with the proper attention.
Many companies that manufacture goods for customers, either at the retail level or to other businesses, require that their supply chain, everyone from the suppliers of raw materials to the shippers of the various parts and supplies, all be ISO certified. That way the entire supply chain is consistent in their approach to certain things. Everyone knows what to expect, everyone knows what the heck is going on.
From the average Joe customer's point of view, dealing with an
ISO 9001 certified company may mean nothing, as a lot of it is transparent, but the Standards actually do specify the purchasing process so that it helps ensure that the customer's needs are understood by the supplier. It also makes it so that the products or services are actually verified as meeting the requirements of the customer. It helps eliminate misunderstandings, as well as having a systematic approach to dealing with misunderstandings and how to minimize them in the future. I know it sounds like just regular ol' good business practices, and it is, except that with the Standards it is all laid out in systematic fashion so that everyone does the same things and everyone knows what the heck is going on.
From a carrier supply chain perspective of a small part of this, as an example, say a customer orders an expedited truck, but the wrong size truck shows up. Well, duh, good business practices say don't do that again. But the ISO Standards go further and tell you
how to not do it again, and does so in a very systematic manner. It forces you to track down why it happened in the first place and deal with the cause rather than the symptom. Was the ordering process such that the customer
thought they were ordering the correct size truck? Were the proper questions not asked of the customer when the order was placed? What questions were asked, and why? Once these have been determined, the problems are recorded, addressed and tracked, and improvement in this area is also tracked.
This kind of systematic approach to quality management helps ensure that you can consistently meet the needs of your customers, and by being certified, customers and businesses on either side of you in the supply chain can count on you to do the right things. That's why it's a big deal.
Is there any body governing the acceptance of requests for new ISO standards? Or will they just keep growing infinitely, which in my mind, renders it pretty insignificant, at least as a marketing ploy.
I'm not sure what you mean. If by "new" you mean new companies that are requesting certification, yeah, once it reaches the saturation point, the marketing effectiveness might be a little diluted. It's like a hardware store declaring that it sells screws and threaded pipe that conforms to the ISO standards, and uses that as a marketing ploy.
As for the the body that governs the standards, and the changes to them, yeah, they're the ISO. And it's not easy to reach a consensus on what is to become standard, as the ISO contains just a snotload of members from all over the world. I just checked, Canada has 381 ISO members, China has 697. The US has 615. There are 157 member countries each with it's own number of ISO members, each member an expert in their field. Each ISO member from each country deals with a specific thing, their field of expertise, like screw threads, or the mechanical properties of fasteners, or the quality of glass for lab equipment, wheel standards for on-road vehicles, or the standards for portable fire extinguishers, or even the horizontal methods for the detection of molecular biomarkers in foods, seeds and propagules of food crops, commodity food crops, fruits, vegetables and derived foods (that's a fancy way of saying genetically altered foods). Once a standard is adopted, it is then reviewed every 5 years for an necessary changes to the "state of the art" standards.
Before 1961 there was no standard freight container. Now, there are 20 standards for freight containers convering things like terminology, classification, dimensions, specifications, test methods of series 1 freight containers (including containers for general purposes, thermal containers, tank containers for dry bulk, platform and platform-based containers) and of air/surface (intermodal) general purpose containers. The standards also deal with the handling and securing of containers, their coding, identification) and marking, information related to containers on board vessels, container equipment data exchange (CEDEX), etc. Thanks to those standards there are more than 5 million freight containers in service around the world.
Great for the purchaser at one plant to buy product from another, to know a standard on one particular thing has been achieved, but fairly meaningless as far as saying much about a company in general.
But, like like expedited carriers, shippers and brokers, you can use an ISO standard freight container and still be a bad company. If you are ISO 9001:2000 certified, you aren't as
likley to be a bad company, though, at least insofar as the supply chain is concerned.
When this whole ISO thing started, was the intent to have it grow exponentially like this?
Well, yeah. Just imagine all the things that can benefit from having a standard in place for it. Or rather, just imagine all the things that would become useless without standards. Imagine having to have a physically different sized credit card for each country you visit because the card readers in each country are different. Imagine every vehicle on the road having a wildy different wheelbase. Imagine having no standards whatsoever for roads, or road signs. Imagine no such thing as a standard pallet. Without the ISO standards for head and face protection, there's no telling how many one-eyed, toothless hockey players there might be out there.
I wonder how many ISO standards out of the total in existence right now, it could be possible for one company to become certified for?
Not many, really. Just depends on what the business is. Most of the ISO standards deal with manufactured goods, like metric screw thread standards, or the containers that hold compressed gas, or standards for boilers, or the composition of steel or other alloys. There are ISO standards for Complaints Handling, and Quality Management, Records Management, Supply Chain Management, even Environmental standards that businesses can be certified for (that one's gonna be a big one pretty soon, like, ISO 14001, which is already becoming a requirement for suppliers to Ford, GM and other automotive companies). But most of the ISO standards apply to products, or equipment used, rather than to the business itself. A company cannot become ISO 9660 certified, for example, as that's the standards for a CD ROM disc.
There are ISO standards for Country Codes, the 2 digit letter codes (and 3 digit numeric codes) for the various countries. That makes it easier for everyone, especially computers. There are currency code standards.
The ISO standards for date and time notations eliminates the confusion that can arise from seeing something like 08/03/05. Is that August 3 2005? Or is that 8 March 2005. Or is that 3 May 2008?
All three of those interpretations are common around the world, and misinterpreting it isn't usually that big a deal, as it's pretty easy to figure out what it's supposed to mean. But when it comes to legal papers and international shipping, everybody needs to know what's going on, so an international standard needs to be in place. Basically, dates and times, the ISO standards make it so that it always goes from the largest element to the smallest, like YYYY-MM-DD, and HH:MM:SS. It makes it easuly writable and readable, as well as easily sortable within computer databases, and it is language independent.
ISO 8601 is the standards for date and time, and is 33 pages long, which should give you an idea of just how easy it is to get a large group of international experts to agree on something as complex as, "What's today's date?" Thirty-three pages.
That's almost as many as this post.
