PIUTEK can provide advice for the achievement of the certification of its organization according to the standards required by ISO 9000 standards.
What quality is?
“Quality” can be defined as the set of factors through which a company realizes a product or service that meets the requirements of effectiveness and efficiency; it satisfies all the requirements, implicit or explicit, required by the client (effectiveness) and optimizes the available resources by creating an organizational structure in which the roles, responsibilities and use of resources (efficiency) are well defined.
From the customer’s point of view, therefore, the quality management system will provide the guarantee that the company will create the requested product / service according to the established procedures and times.
The market, focusing on greater consumer protection, has established rules and imposed behaviors that have made the “quality” the protagonist of the production processes; this is why we felt the need to regularize these processes in a clear and unambiguous way.
The ISO standard
The ISO – International Standard Organization – has elaborated for this purpose, a family of voluntary standards, ISO 9000, aimed at companies wishing to approach the issue of their organizational quality.
The ISO 9000 standards are internationally recognized and the companies that apply them draw countless benefits: both on an economic level – market expansion, better credibility towards customers, greater competitiveness, etc., and internally – guarantee of customer satisfaction , preparation of a defined organization chart, ease in the control of production processes (and therefore cost reorganization), etc.
Initially, a fundamental step was the quality control on the finished product (made to sample), aimed at verifying the safety, the lack of defects, the reliability, etc.
Later, following the awareness that quality is generated in the processes, it was necessary to expand the control also to the production processes, and following the evaluation of the entire company system.
It can therefore be said that ISO 9000 is a series of rules that regulate the quality management system, which has as its object the company organization.
In particular, the ISO 9000: 2000 standard (“Quality management systems – Foundations and vocabulary”) defines the common terminology and the principles of the quality management system; ISO 9001: 2008 (“Quality management systems – Requirements”) defines the requirements that the organization must wait to implement the quality system and obtain recognition (certification) from a third party; ISO 9004: 2000 (“Quality management systems – Guidelines for performance improvements”), non-standard
certifiable but still subject to the so-called “Quality Awards”.
The quality management system
In general, the quality management system is the set of means (control, test, etc.), people (personal control, management, etc.), documentation (procedures, registrations) that allow the company to meet the requirements of the client.
The steps to be taken to implement a quality management system are:
• Company analysis: identify the main activities of the company and evaluate possible exclusions (only 7.x point of the standard and justified in the manual – point 4.2.2.
• Activation of the System: describe the tasks, verify and complete the description of the main activities identified in the previous phase, find the correlation points between the norm and the main activities mentioned, apply the standard and the System, make the System functional and relevant to reality.
• Improvement of the system: use the collected data to realize the possible improvements, corrective and preventive and keep under control the changes introduced in order to appreciate the advantages obtained.
Objective of the quality management system
The main objective of a quality system is to create a structure able to ensure the quality level promised to the customer, as well as to continuously improve its results.
Quality is therefore at the same time a goal, a “modus operandi” and a necessary condition to create an effective organization able to compete in markets that are and still remain highly regulated: it constitutes the “quid” able to provide certainty to the client because aimed at satisfying its needs and requirements.