When we start talking to organisations about the use of checklists in their operations to ensure nothing gets missed and what needs to get check or inspected gets, well, checked and inspected we get a lot of push back. It's accepted that checklists are prevalent in HR for things like inductions, health and safety programs have no end of checklists ...

The management review is possibly one of the most useful parts of the entire standard yet it's also one of the most underused! ISO9001:2015 Clause 9.3 is all about the requirements for that management review and the very 1st part 9.3.1 gives us a bit of a general overview of the point of the clause.   General Expectations of the Managemen...

Martin looked at the calendar on his wall and back to the invite on the screen to the off-site review. That can't be right he thought, we only just had an off-site to figure out this strategy stuff. He cast his mind back to the 2 days they had spent at the Hermitage Hotel in Mt Cook Village, it had become one of his favourite places on earth, the w...

When we talk to people about ISO9001 there are a few things that come up as the reasons not to do it, one is the need to document things, the other is around non-conformance and the final one is always the need for doing internal audits. Typically, I get told we fail enough external audits to know what we need to fix anyway! Or worse – we never fai...

Let's face it if you are working through ISO9001:2015 you already know that you need to monitor, measure, analyse and evaluate your quality management system, we talked about it way back in Clause 4.4 and again in Clause 6.2. You already understand why it's important so why is it here again in ISO9001:2015 Clause 9.1.1? I guess you could look at th...

I have a question for you to think about this week. How often have you had a conversation with a colleague, a staff member or perhaps even your partner where you left feeling sure they knew what to do, what you wanted, what was expected yet that's not how they felt? Let me ask it another way, how often do you feel frustrated because something wasn'...

Unless you are operating in some mystical nirvana the reality is at some point you are going to have rework in your organisation, you have rework because you have a non-conforming output and so ISO9001:2015 has some requirements for you to meet in order to ensure that you control these adequately. The other thing that tends to happen around non-con...

People never seem to pay attention or understand what's being said, why do I have to keep repeating myself? We have said that our culture is X or that our priority is Y it was perfectly clear! I hear this time and again from leaders at all levels in organisations so often I'm losing count. Frequently it's backed up with I've told people this, we me...

What is the signal within your organisation that your product or service is ready to be handed over to the customer? That is essentially the question that ISO9001:2015 is asking in Clause 8.6 – Release of Products and Services. Previously we have talked about verification and validation of your product or service to ensure that it meets the end use...

Lighthouses have got to be one of the most magical of buildings ever created, I love them. They stand against the mighty elements, the wind, the rain, the hail, the sun and everything else the environment has to throw at them. They stand firm, throwing out the vast illumination to light the way, showing where is safe and what isn't. The lighthouses...

Have you ever had one of those days when you are working through something you have done many times before only for someone to say, oh hey we changed how we do that, or we don't use those parts now we changed that? Frustrating isn't it? It's also pretty wasteful as it can create a bunch of rework or worse useless products or services no one wants o...

When people talk about lean there are so many areas that are discussed, there are of course all the tools – 5s, Kanban, load balancing (Heijunka), mistake proofing (poka-yoke) Root Cause analysis with things like fishbone diagrams, A3 problem solving, Andon systems, Gemba walks, Kaizen and so the list goes on, there is the history of it and what it...

ISO9001:2015 clause 8.5.5 – Post Delivery Activities is as the name suggests, all about how you support your customers after they get their hands on your products or services. Before going too much further just pause for a second and think about the time when you have bought say a car or a new cell phone and you wanted to follow up support for it, ...

One of the fundamental elements of lean is to create pull in the system, so what does that mean? Well lets first agree what we mean when we talk about push systems and the challenges that they create and about what the heck grab is!   A Push System  Most of the time when you hear people talking about push systems, they are describing make...

Preservation may sound like an unusual thing to talk about when it comes to ISO9001:2015 but that's exactly what clause 8.5.4 is all about and as is the tendency for this standard it's a small clause, only 20 words in fact, and a short note to give some hints, surely that can't be a big deal then?... well it is and here's why. Clause 8.5.4 is 100% ...

Just before Christmas, I got my 1st pair of reading glasses, this was after much persuasion from my wife and daughter that something wasn't as good as it could be with my vision. The key hint apparently was me running out of arms length when reading books, reading labels on food for ingredients went a while before that.  I was actually pretty ...

When I worked in subcontract electronics, we build products for a great range of organisations and a great range of industries. One of the challenges there is making sure you test things properly before you ship them both electrically and mechanically where a specific fit is required. Sometimes we would build the test gear and sometimes the custome...

Clause 8.5.2 of ISO9001:2015 is a very brief section which outlines the need for the organisation to (it's got that Shall word in it again meaning you must) be able to identify and trace their products and services, it's brief but important, here's why.   Identification Let's start with identification since you would find it tricky to trace an...