C ONTROLES AL CLERO

5.5.1 ISO—A QUICK FIX

The ISO 9001 (BS 5750 part 1) requirements represent 20 qualified questions put to the company in order to determine the company’s ability to control the specified quality agreed upon in a contract situation. Provided that the buyer is capable of expressing all

his expectations for the delivery and putting them down in the contract, the 20 quality activities represented by ISO 9001 may create an excellent quality assurance for the buyer.

As a consequence of the importance of the basis on which a contract is made up and the faith in the quality assurance of the other 19 ISO 9001 requirements, the ISO people’ are not necessarily interested in such vital areas as:

• vision and strategies;

• sales and marketing activities; • customer satisfaction; • management accounting;

• company culture and employee satisfaction; • continuous improvement;

• technology; • business ethics; • impact on society.

If you build your quality management system narrow-mindedly on the ISO 9001, 9002 (BS 5750 part 2), or 9003 (BS 5750 part 3) standards, there is a big risk that the company will be divided up into two sections A and B. The ‘A team’ consists of the employees and activities influenced by ‘ISO’ and the ‘B team’ consists of the employees and the activities which are influenced by ‘ISO’ only to a limited degree. The sales and marketing function is often a significant example of one of the company’s ‘B teams’ where quality management is concerned.

However, in many companies, to build a quality management system which alone is closely focusing on ISO 9001, 9002 or 9003 has turned out to be a barrier against subsequent quality development with everybody’s participation.

ISO 9001, 9002 and 9003 represent a set of external standards for the assurance of the customer’s interest (quality assurance). We have been familiar with such standards for decades, as a number of external quality standards flooded the international market in the time after the Second World War. The development of the standards had its root in the US military, space and atomic energy programmes but gradually any self-respecting country acquired its own standard.

The new and important characteristic about ISO 9000 has been the thought that the ISO series should represent the best among the numerous national, military and other standards used, which consisted either of one total standard (e.g. ANSI Z-1.15) or—as ISO 9000—consisted of more standards divided up into levels (such as NATO’s AQAP series and BS 5750). Canada was pretty much alone with its CSA Z299 standards in four levels but the Canadian quality standards, which were considered by many to be those most intensively prepared, were refused and instead BS 5750 was chosen as the foundation of ISO 9000 in 1987.

Whether the ISO 9000 series does represent the best from the previous standards is still a question to be answered as the first edition of the ISO 9000 from 1987 must in fact be seen as the ‘compromise of the compromises’, which had, as its superior goal, to create one series of standards which were internationally recognized. The international recognition of the ISO 9000 standards and the international co-operation between the

certifying bodies of every country gives an ISO 9000 certification international importance.

An ISO 9000 certification is in the process of becoming a necessary driver’s licence being internationally recognized. A driver’s licence the credibility of which is dependent on at least three factors: the qualifications of those who give the certification, the check- list (the ISO standard) and the time reserved for the certification. The purpose of this section is to focus on the advantages and disadvantages of the spread of the ISO 9000 series seen in relation to the TQM strategy.

When we entitled this section ‘ISO 9000—a quick fix’, it was not to detract from the long-standing efforts made by many companies to obtain an ISO 9000 certificate. The reason for the phrase ‘a quick fix’ has two elements. Firstly, it is possible to certify nearly every company within a few years once the money for it is granted. Secondly, there is a considerable risk—and we will go deeper into this later—that, once certified, the quality management system, which is orientated toward customers’ demands, will be frozen and only improved concurrently with the improvements of the ISO 9000 standard.

However, we are of the opinion that an ISO certification used in a thoughtful way may be a useful step in a company’s efforts ‘to do things right’ and thus contribute to the company’s TQM development for which the goal is not only to do things right, but to do ‘the right things’.

The ISO series is trying to quality assure the customer requirements specified in the contract. In other words, the company tries to do the things right which are specified in the contract. There are, however, two limitations in this ‘philosophy’. One of them is that the customer is not always able to specify his real needs and the other is that customer requirements are dynamic and are therefore constantly developing. ISO 9000 does thus not necessarily assure that we do the right things.

The difference between an ISO 9000 certificate and the visionary TQM goal can be expressed in this way: ‘Catch a fish for a man and he is fed for a day (a quick fix), teach him to fish (not a quick fix) and he is fed for life.’

5.5.2 ISO 9000—A MEANS OF STANDARDIZATION?

We must admit that we profess the mere ISO certification process is recognized as a means of standardization and this opinion is based especially on the following two facts: 1. It is allowable to use the ISO 9000 and the result of a certification in the best possible

way.

2. A certification can be an excellent starting point for the support of a disciplined effort to get the best practice standardized as the foundation and necessary condition for continuous improvements.

Besides this disciplined effort to attain the perhaps much-needed standards demanded by an ISO certification and which we consider the most important positive element of a certification, we should like also to emphasize other elements which are considered positive by many companies:

• Uniform criteria for external assessment of the quality management system of a company.

• A simplification and rationalization of new contract situations between customers and their suppliers.

A last element of an ISO 9000 certification, which is certainly not to be underestimated, is the fact that for many of the companies it is the first time that money is granted for a quality project.

5.5.3 ISO 9000—A BARRIER TOWARDS NEW THINKING AND IMPROVEMENTS?

Since the ISO 9000 series first appeared in 1987, a rigid debate for and against ISO has been carried on.

Sympathizers of ISO are often people who have carried through a certification process and the opponents on the other side are people who have never been involved in a certification process. The opponents attack sympathizers as people who are in a tight corner. People in this category can be company owners who have spent a great deal of money on the project or perhaps certification bodies which have gained permanent income from the increasing number of certified companies or it can be ISO consultants.

Sympathizers attack opponents and accuse them of being people without any ISO experience. People in this category can be those company owners who prefer to go for the European Quality Award, it can be TQM experts, TQM consultants or just people who doubt the excellence of the ISO 9000.

The only issue upon which sympathizers and opponents seem to agree is that often an ISO certification requires a great deal of paperwork and money.

As this section will especially focus on the more critical sides of an ISO 9000 certification, we should like to include some statements from a newspaper article by Louis Printz, professor at the Aarhus School of Business, Denmark, in which he—under the headline ‘Highly Dangerous Medicine’—expresses the following opinions:

• ISO is gradually developing to become patented medicine for leaders and specialists who do not know the real requirements of a company.

• Nobody has, for instance, criticized the concept for not taking into consideration the company’s place in the right market.

• Today the concept is, as a rule, used uncritically without any explanation that it certainly also has its limitations.

• ISO is only a single medicine in the company’s cabinet and it should be used together with other tools in the correct order and in the right dosage to have the maximum effect. Otherwise, the organization lacks what it needs to survive. The medicine may become highly dangerous.

• ISO is easily applied and managed to create discipline in the production process without any involvement by the management worth mentioning.

• At the same time an organization is created in which necessary alterations at a later stage will be both costly and difficult to make.

• It is not only a question of the quality of a product. Quality applies to the same extent to the management, the culture of the company, the marketing etc.

The essence of Professor Printz’s message is, in our opinion, that the ISO 9000 is very appropriate for the standardization process but the company will not make any progress

without relying on excellent leadership—that is what we have named Total Quality Management.

We see two problems in the current ISO debate. One of them is that no objective investigation based upon facts of what an ISO certification does actually mean for the company has ever been made. The other problem, which is often ignored, is that it is not the ISO 9000 standards—or their fathers, the technical committee behind the ISO standards—who claim that the standards are more than the documents of requirements. No, it is the sympathizers, opponents and doubters trying to overestimate, underestimate, or who do not care at all about the ISO 9000 standards who are the real problem.

We do not believe that the ISO crusade can be stopped and why indeed stop a reasonable work of standardization? The real issue is to ensure that standardization goes hand in hand with excellent management and creativity and, as we have seen from both Joharry’s window and from Kondo, this is indeed possible.

REFERENCES

Deming, W.E. (1986, 1993) Out of the Crisis, MIT, USA.

Fukuda, R. (1983) Managerial Engineering, Productivity Inc., Stanford, USA.

Kanji, G.K., Morris, D. and Haigh, R. (1993) Philosophy and system dimension of T.Q.M.: a further education case study, in Proceedings of the Advances in Quality Systems for TQM, Taipei, Taiwan.

Kondo, Y. (1991) Human Motivation: A Key factor for Management, 3 A Corporation, Tokyo, Japan.

Senge, P.M. (1991) The Fifth Discipline—The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday Currency, New York, USA.

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