Advantages of Outsourcing your ISO implementation Project
Do you have customers requiring ISO certification and don’t know where to begin?
ISO 9001 and other ISO standards are based on certain requirements. These requirements vary depending on the standard. An organization seeking certification is responsible for establishing, documenting, implementing, and once certified, maintaining the ISO system.
Can an organization’s personnel implement the requirements on their own?
Of course they can! If the organization can expend the time and energy of one of the managers to attend a couple of weeks of training and dedicate a good part of the next several months to documenting and implementing the requirements, then yes. Once the requirements are learned, the challenge can be applying these requirements in their respective operation.
Then Why Engage a Certification Consultant?
Time and money. While there is a cost in hiring a consultant, there is also a cost for a company to utilize internal resources.
The fundamental advantage is that a good consultant will provide common sense explanations in understanding ISO 9001. The standard is full of vague requirements leaving individuals new to ISO with a sense of frustration trying to nail down, “what does this mean?”
Aside from this, a good consultant can help with proven methodologies and supply you with sample forms, etc. Many companies feel that they need to invest in software or otherwise incur other expenses to implement an ISO system. This is not the case.
A good consultant will develop level one and two documents for you and will include the interaction of processes. Your documentation should reflect what your company does. It should also meet the requirements of the standard, leaving you with a manageable system. This is one of the biggest pitfalls…companies choosing to tackle this on their own often over document creating more work for themselves down the road in doc modification.
Consultants can also help with quality objectives, management review, internal audits and corrective action.
Conclusion
Overall, hiring an ISO expert will expedite your ability to achieve certification more quickly, which will in turn, keep your customers happy.