It was my first day in my new role and I was shown to the Technical Manager’s office. “Oh, there seems to be a lot of quality manuals in here” I said. “Yes” the Technical Secretary said, “That’s our Quality Management System, ISO 9001 certification has created a monster”

I spent several hours, no days or even maybe weeks looking through my new library, the Quality Management System consisted of Policies, a Quality Manual, Production Procedures, Laboratory Manual, Laboratory Procedures, Process Specifications, and Testing Schedules etc.

The Quality Management System was fairly standard, however, every single document used a thousand words when one would suffice. I was in big trouble, there was no way I was going to be able to manage all this paperwork and maintain our ISO 9001 certification, so we had major work to do and hopefully would save a rain forest in the process!

The Quality Management System contained a Process Specification for every single one of our 200 products and each one was 90 pages long! So by my maths the manual contained 18,000 pages! I was ruthless and condensed the Process Specifications to a one page quality process summary. As you can imagine on the next ISO 9001 surveillance visit I was more than a bit apprehensive! The Lead Assessor was almost as relieved as I was. Here in plain and simple English or with a flow diagram we had outlined exactly what we did. It was simple it was basic but it reflected what we did, how we did it and the control points in our process.” I can confidently say you have made your quality management system significantly more efficient” said the Lead Assessor.

Flushed with the positive review from our Lead Assessor, I continued my war on paper and condensed our quality management system documentation. It was a case of keep it simple, document what you do, don’t document something just for the sake of trying to create paperwork.

As a department we were able to free up time and resource to concentrate on improving our quality management system effectiveness and efficiency. This is turn was reflected in other departments in the factory. We were able to extend the scope of our ISO 9001 certification to a new production facility with relative ease. That was in 1994 and now the ISO 9001:2008 standard is far more practical and user friendly, it generates a focus and disciplines that are invaluable to any business. The standard is a quality management system tool that is now my friend rather than my enemy.