You may have certification to one or more of the aforementioned standards, yet find the system burdensome, not fully understood by all personnel, and not really adding value to your business, other than the fact you have a certificate.
The process-approach is promoted in ISO 9001. Annex A of this standard states “There is no requirement in this International Standard for its structure and terminology to be applied to the documented information of an organization’s quality management system.
The structure of clauses is intended to provide a coherent presentation of requirements, rather than a
model for documenting an organization’s policies, objectives and processes. The structure and content of documented information related to a quality management system can often (we say always) be more relevant to its users if it relates to both the processes operated by the organization and information maintained for other purposes”
The process-approach enables the people in the organisation to understand and relate to the system, whereas systems based on clauses of, and using certain terminology contained in, the standard, are not generally understood, except maybe by the quality, environmental or health & safety “practitioner”, resulting in the rest of the people developing a negative attitude toward a system that is supposed to be helping them.
Our clients’ systems are process-based, unnecessary documentation, duplication etc. is avoided and process owners are able to take ownership of their processes.
This does not necessarily mean that you would have to scrap everything you have and start afresh – we have developed techniques to convert clause-based systems to the process approach, paving the way for natural attrition of non-value adding documentation.
