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Why indeed do more than the minimum requirements of ISO 9001? There are two sides to this question.
One needs to be clear about the goal. Is the goal simply to get ISO 9001 certification or to develop a capability to satisfy your customers? In theory the answer to these two should be identical because organizations should not get a certificate if they don't have the capability to satisfy their customers. In reality this is far from the truth. ISO 9001 registered organizations are failing to meet their customer's expectations on a daily basis.
In truth, this is the wrong question because if you need to ask this question, you have probably misunderstood the purpose of ISO 9001. ISO 9001:2015 is an assessment standard -
To get the certificate you need do no more -
Doing more than ISO 9001 requires is like limiting your education to the questions on the exam paper. People who get on in life learn much more than the scope of the examinations they take. So it equally true of business. Businesses need to do more than what is prescribed in ISO 9001 to operate successfully. There is no organization on the planet that only does what is prescribed in ISO 9001 simply because it is not a prescription for how to run a business.
ISO 9001 addresses only certain aspects of the system organization's need to operate to enable them to satisfy customer needs and expectations. Not all aspects are covered although it rather depends on how one interprets the words. One could argue that staff salaries have nothing to do with ISO 9001. But if one asks, what affects our ability to satisfy our customers we are likely to list among the answers, the competence of our people -
A few years ago a nuclear processing plant was in the news for falsifying quality control records. Day after day, the workers would measure hundreds of tiny pellets of fuel. Tedious, repetitive and not really necessary -
This is a company that had obtained ISO 9001 certification but the certification body had not examined culture when conducting the audit. Customers were not satisfied. Culture is not overtly covered in ISO 9001 but it is addressed by the Leadership Principle described in ISO 9000 (see Quality Management Principles) therefore one sometimes has to do more than what ISO 9001 requires to develop the capability needed to satisfy customer's needs and expectations.
© Transition Support Last edit 12/12/2022
Transition Support
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