What does the ISO 9001 continual improvement process requires? What exactly are we improving?
The process itself:
- How long the process lasted?
- How much raw material was used?
- How much scrap we had?
- How many times they stopped the machine?
- How many times the customer complained?
- How many times the customer called and said thank you?
How you analyze all this? With the information you gathered over the time. You collect the information, look at it, and examine it (with charts, tables or reports). You try to understand what is going on. Then you arrive to a conclusion. How all this is relevant to the continual improvement? After examining the information you may asses the situation. And depending on the assessment you should take measures of improvement. The ISO 9001 standard demands that in paragraph 8.5.1 – Continual improvement. The best part of it is that you decide how to act according to the information. In order to begin a continual improvement process you must declare first where you are measuring in relevance to what is expected of you. What are your results in relevance to what was determined for you? Goals do not always supposed to be measurable numbers like sales or incomes. According to the ISO 9001 standard goals and targets must relate to the realization process. For example:
- Improvement in Customer’s satisfaction
- Reducing customer’s product returns
- Reducing customer’s complaints
- Reducing product disqualifications
Continual improvement process – determining the need
After assessing your situation you shall initiate actions for improvement. For every process that did not achieve his goals, you must determine improvement measures (I highly recommend documenting it on a plan). The ISO 9001 continual improvement process does not require documenting it on a form but it requires that you will be able to prove that you performed the measure for improvement and present results. Confused? Well, this is the ISO 9001 Standard. So now we know that first, you must determine where you need to improve The need for continual improvement can come from the top management as well. The top management makes decisions in their long meetings. Their decisions are usually general and vague. Something like:
- Increase sales
- Introduce new products
- Gather more customers
- Upgrade the services
- Reduce problems
- Be better
Continual improvement process – Managing
According to the ISO 9001 standard these may be your quality targets whether they are documented or not. In order manage all that you need a tool. The tool must provide you with abilities to manage all parameters. Managing continual improvement process may also use the method of task management. Task management provides you with performing the right actions on the right time. Top management ordered the decisions and you must accomplish. In order to get results you must define the needed actions. Each action is actually a task. Any task could be divided into sub – tasks. The task may include the next characters (it is not required by the ISO 9001 standard but it will sure look good on the audit:
- What is needed to achieve
- Who is responsible
- Until when the Task must be accomplished
- What are the resources needed
Let’s take the division and analyze it.
Continual improvement process – what is needed to be achieved
Putting words into actions. Let’s take an example. The top management decided to improve a product due to customer compliant and returns. We must take this decision and create tasks to perform. At the end of the process the product problem must be detected and improved. The tasks may be something like:
- Analyzing the returns in light of product characters
- Building an improvement plan for each problematic character
- Design, research and development
- Meetings
- Passing information from one department to another.
Every one of these example divides itself into sub tasks and all of them must get results at the end.
Continual improvement process – delegating the task
It is needed to define who is responsible for each task. Who needs to perform, who needs to report. Any task must have a “papa” or a “mama In cases of multi tasks, undoubtedly some tasks would be left behind or forgotten: the same tasks that are usually perceived as hard work. If no one is responsible they would be done late if at all. Only after the top management will start to ask their questions, then someone will wake up. Therefore it is important to link someone to each task. Don’t forget to document it. After all we are working according to the ISO 9001 standard…
Continual improvement process – time frames
Any task must be limited in time. This is a main character of a project: a starting point and a finish point. Time is a resource. It is needed to be managed as any other resource. Top management want results (and usually fast without consideration of the real life outside the board meeting). That means that you must manage time and link it to the tasks. Otherwise you won’t even know that you are behind schedules.
Continual improvement process – the required resources
This is a common parameter for all tasks in the world. Usually the resources are limited. Therefore you must seek that you don’t exceed over what was allocated for the task. The matter becomes much more complex when tasks multiply and also the required resources.
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