ISO 9001 Certification in Saudi Arabia

There’s one more foundational concept to cover before we get into the rest of the standard, and that’s the PDCA Cycle: Plan, Do, Check, Act. All the requirements of ISO 9001 fall somewhere in this cycle.  You can think of it as a map of ISO 9001 itself. This cycle shows how your entire quality management system works toward continual improvement and customer satisfaction. It also shows that quality isn’t a once and done thing. It’s a continuing cycle of making plans, acting on those plans, evaluating your results, and making the needed improvements.

The first requirements of ISO 9001 fall under the “planning phase” of the PDCA cycle. And the first step of planning is to Determine the Context of your Organization. As a company, you have all sorts of influences. “Influences” here is a broad category. This could mean people, policies, regulations, facilities—literally, anything that influences your business, from the inside or the outside. And this includes what ISO calls “interested parties:” people with any sort of stake in your business. This could be employees, management, customers, partners, shareholders, even regulatory bodies. All these influences form a web of connectedness, and that web is the context of your organization. Now this is important.  With a clear picture of your context, you can develop a quality management system that fits your specific needs and goals. The next requirements deal with Leadership. Top management needs to take hands-on ownership of your quality management system. That’s why you find Leadership at the center of the PDCA cycle.

 All the spokes of the wheel connect to this hub. Top management bears several major responsibilities. They need to create your quality policy. That’s a document that demonstrates your commitment to high quality. They need to set objectives and delegate responsibilities. They should also review your system regularly and provide the resources you need to achieve quality. Top management steers the ship. The next part of the planning phase is, simply enough, called Planning. This is where risk-based thinking comes into play. You need to take all the risks you’ve identified and come up with objectives to address them. And be specific here. Create goals you can actually benchmark. Because later on, it’s not going to help if your only objective was “do better.” You need to pick objectives you can quantify. Finally, the planning phase ends with Support and Resources. Again, Leadership must provide the resources and support you need. This means employees, facilities, equipment, basically anything you need to effectively run your business. This requirement covers several key areas, but let’s zoom in on just one: communication and awareness. Communication is one of the easiest places for quality to break down. ISO 9001 makes it a top priority. You need to make sure everyone is aware of policies and changes in the organization.

Next, we’ve reached the “do” phase of ISO 9001. This starts with Operations Control. In this phase, you’re essentially enacting the plans you made during the planning phase. So let’s break this down into its two main parts. “Operations” is a blanket term for pretty much everything that goes into creating your products and services. “Controls” are the steps taken to direct your processes toward the desired results.

By controlling specific risks, you can avoid costly errors. But how do you know that these controls are doing what they’re meant to do? That’s why ISO 9001 continues on into the “check” phase with Performance Evaluation. In this phase, you check your processes and ask, “How do my results stack up against the goals I’ve set?” Think back to the process approach.

Consider the outputs of your processes. Are you getting the outputs you wanted? Or do you see what ISO 9001 calls nonconformities: things that don’t conform to your quality management system? As part of evaluation, you’re required to perform an internal audit. Think of this as a dry-run of your official, third-party certification audit. This lets you find issues and correct them before certification is on the line. Now this internal audit can be a tricky part of certification for companies unfamiliar with ISO 9001. At Core Business Solutions, we provide Internal Auditor Training courses for ISO 9001 and other standards, so you can perform your internal audit with confidence. And our CORE Compliance Platform provides online tools to help you track nonconformities.

 Finally we reach the “Act” phase, where we turn those evaluations into actual improvement with Corrective Actions. Now that might sound like a harsh term, like you’re wagging your finger at someone. But in this context “corrective actions” are just the steps you take to fix the issues you found during your evaluations. Corrective actions get at the root cause of a problem, to prevent similar issues from happening again. And an important note: your company leadership should be driving this improvement. ISO 9001 requires top management to meet regularly to review your quality management system and address the issues they discover.  So now you can see how the PDCA cycle works through the whole ISO 9001 standard, all to produce customer satisfaction on the other end. But remember, this is a cycle. Once you’re finished, you start back at the beginning. That’s how ISO 9001 drives continual improvement and customer satisfaction. That brings us to the end of the standard.