Eye of the Beholder | How Dickson Makes ISO 9001 Compliance Something Beautiful

Something doesn’t have to be pretty to be beautiful. I can’t think of a better example of this than a child’s artwork. The stick figures and the scribbles may not be pretty to a casual viewer, but the thought process that went into the work can be amazing. The consideration and detail may not always be what you’d consider logical, but the destination often matched the journey through their growing minds.

The same, can be argued, applies to most products on the market today. The raw materials in use are often not pleasing to a consumer’s eye, but what they become at the end of the production line can be magnificent. It just takes a lot of TLC to maximize quality of the final result. That’s why QMPs are important.

According to ISO, QMPs, or quality management principles, are a set of fundamental beliefs, norms, rules, and values that are accepted as true and can be used as a basis for quality management. ISO 9001 is built upon them. It’s built upon seven of them, in fact.

Many of our customers are familiar with this regulation because quality is an important part of their everyday work environment. Our company motto, when every point matters, lives and breathes the first principle of the ISO. If the primary focus of quality management is to meet customer requirements and to strive to exceed customer expectations then you need to ensure that every step from A to Z is accounted for appropriately. According to ISO, that means recognizing the direct and indirect customers as those who receive value from your organization. That’s critical.

Think of it this way. Our devices monitor your goods. If something goes wrong and you aren’t aware of it, that product can get into the hands of the end consumer. In food, that could mean a bacteria outbreak, salmonella, food poisoning, etc. In medicine, that can mean the degradation of medication to the point that it doesn’t provide any benefit to the patient, leaving them at risk for something they thought they were protected against. In aerospace, the fault of a single piece of equipment can put the lives of everyone on board at risk. Each one of these end users may not be our customers, but they are our indirect customers who receive value, and protection, from what we, both us and you, do.

Leadership is the second QMP of the ISO. It is meant to direct those compliant with the regulation to create unity of purpose and direction as well as create an environment where people are engaged in achieving quality objectives. While we’d all love to name ourselves leaders in our fields, our DicksonOne system does empower company leaders to manage their monitoring and improve the communication throughout all levels of the organization.

With escalating alarms, you can empower your employees to manage their own areas, while still being made aware should an excursion not be addressed. It means increasing the efficiency in meeting quality objectives while improving communication between all levels of your organization.

This obviously also touches on the third principle, the engagement of people. In order to manage an organization efficiently and effectively, the involvement of all is critical. Empowering employees to take control over their own space isn’t just providing this, it’s also motivating your employees and fosters a better work environment. Leigh Richards, a writer for the small business section of Chron.com suggests that employee empowerment improves productivity, reduces costs, allows for better customer service, and helps employees better embrace change within the organization.

While the fourth, fifth, and sixth principles align with our systems, they also run hand in hand with what we offer to our customers through our services division.

Process Approach - Consistent and predictable results are achieved more effectively and efficiently when activities are understood and managed as interrelated processes that function as a coherent system.

Improvement - Successful Organizations have an ongoing focus on improvement

Evidence-Based Decision Making - Decision-based on the analysis and evaluation of data and information are more likely to produce desired results.

Taken together you start to see a pattern emerge. In our opinion, these are more about the data than the processes themselves. By collecting data you can analyze in order to create more consistent and predictable results. This analysis allows your company to improve its processes to increase efficiency. This, thusly, makes your company more likely to produce desired results.

That means that you’ve got to collect the data. Our mapping services can provide you with the data you need to fully understand the nuances of your cold storage, facility, chamber, and manufacturing floor so you can improve upon your processes. It will provide you a fully three-dimensional look at what you’re monitoring so you can better understand all of the hot and cold spots that may exist because of transference, HVAC nuances, or even weak points in a facility’s walls.

The data is provided in a lengthy report that isn’t only defendable in an audit, but it provides actionable insight into process improvement. This means more efficiency, less waste, and, ultimately, better results.

The final QMP is about relationship management. For sustained success, an organization manages its relationships with interested parties, such as suppliers. Many of our customers use systems like ours to monitor product on behalf of their partners, and share the data collected through reporting functionality, to provide transparency on the validity of work.

Also, with the ability to add unlimited users, it’s possible to share data within your own company, and between organizations by providing logins for everyone who’s interested. It’s just another way to add efficiency to the work day while meeting the principles as outlined in 9001. It means that if you’re looking for ISO compliance you don’t need to look any further than Dickson. While we like to think we’re as pretty as we are beautiful, we’ll leave it up to you to decide.

ISO 9001 is a complex subject relating to quality management across a wide array of industries. For questions about quality management as they relate to your industry, contact a Dickson expert today