A lot of companies are wondering why they should get accreditation for their quality system. Here are my top three reasons, not necessarily in the specific order of importance:

1. To give a (commercial) signal of trust to the market/customers about the qualitative approach of your organization.
2. To get external “objective” pressure (in order to force yourself to KEEP ON working on it).
3. Because a customer or the market requires you to.

The second reason is in fact the most important one to discuss, especially because it’s the only reason that comes out of free will. If a customer or the market demands it, you have no option. Opting consciously for accreditation is something you do in order to create that pressure. An objective authority checking up on you on a regular basis to see whether you’re still reaching your goals and demands makes sure you don’t lose focus. Whenever this external pressure is gone, companies tend to slide back to their old (bad) habits. All the previous excuses (too busy, too bureaucratic, we have to be “flexible”…) are stated again and cause a return to old ways of trying to meet quality requirements.

The draft for the new version of ISO9001 was brought to a vote until end of February 2008. In this version, ISO9001:2008, a few minor changes and amendments were added. A quite drastic change is the explicit statement that the management representative has to be chosen from the own organization. Does this mean interim quality management or outsourcing will come to an end?

I can understand the concerns of ISO about the “outsourcing” of quality management and control but I’m also afraid they added a demand that’s very hard to enforce. Such a statement leaves a lot of room for interpretation so all will depend a lot on the auditor how this will be evaluated. How will an auditor deal with a company where the official “QA Manager”, sharing this function with a lot of other functions, is assisted by an external QA Assistant (outsourcing)? Officially, the management representative is someone internal to the organization, fully complaint to the ISO9001:2008 guidelines but in reality the full quality system is set up and maintained by an external consultant.

The future will teach us how auditors will deal with this, at least if the text will be approved in full. Time will tell!

On March 27th 1977, the biggest accident in airline history took place (at least if we leave the attack on the Twin Towers out of the equation).

The accident happened due to a concurrence of circumstances and an accumulation of human errors escalating to a disastrous 583 casualties.

A few of those circumstances and/or causes were:

• Stressors: fog and drizzle (limited sight of 1000 to 3000 feet), pilots were stressed out because both Boeing 747’s were (inconveniently) diverted to Tenerife instead of their original destination, Las Palmas. They couldn’t go there because of a bomb alarm, causing serious delays.
• Human error: due to the limited vision, the PanAm reaches the junction too late causing them to remain on the runway (too long).
• Technical problems: part of the lighting (center line) wasn’t ready yet and they were experiencing radio interference.
  Authority: the KLM captain was (internationally) known for being ‘the exemplary pilot’ of KLM. He was a pilot and a flight instructor at the same time and KLM used him in advertising. They referred to him as Mr. KLM. Although his colleagues were uncertain about the position of the PanAm, they wouldn’t question his authority.

This story proves that a lot can go fundamentally wrong due to a couple of “human errors”. In order to reduce the risk on errors, making an overview of all possible “risk factors” and taking precautionary measures where possible (some factors are hard to prevent) is a good start. FMEA is a very know method originating from the automotive industry. On the other hand, FMEA doesn’t really consider human errors.

If you’re interested in some more background information about this accident, you can find a lot of opinions, details and multimedia on http://www.project-tenerife.com/

Research has proven that, when questioned, about 50% of employees of a company or organization are stating that they are spending an average of 1 to 2 hours a week on correcting errors. Theirs and their colleagues’. 17% of the questioned admit to losing more than 4 hours weekly. This not only costs a lot of money (mostly hidden costs) but leads to a lot of frustration with personnel.

Most important cause for this is once again “human error”. If you do some quick math on how many people work in your organization, you can have a general idea of how much (financial) leverage is within reach once you decide to work on these “errors”.