The importance of certification

Management system standards provide a model for businesses to follow when developing and implementing management systems. The standards provide frameworks for an organization to follow in managing its processes, so its products or services meet the objectives it has set. Objectives might cover customer service, environmental targets or legislation.

The standards are designed to be applied to any organization, whatever its size, in any sector: public, private or not for profit. Primarily because the standards address each business’s individual objectives, the variety of standards adopted, and in many cases used for certification, will vary from company to company, according to the company’s needs and its sector of operation. The plan-do-check-
act cycle is the main principle behind these standards.

Why go for certification?

Since their infancy in the late 1950s, with quality standards for military procurement in the US, management standards have aimed to improve performance in companies by encouraging the development of systems and processes to consistently produce appropriate products and services and manage risk. “A good management system standard forces an organization to consider all of its processes and document them,” says Roger Bennett, director for conformity assessment bodies at the International Accreditation Forum. “If followed properly, a standard tries to enforce a culture of continual improvement – which should mean better efficiency, quality, higher security, less impact on the environment and so on,” he adds.

Among the most widely implemented management system standards are ISO 9001, which gives requirements for quality management, and ISO 14001 for environmental management systems. ISO’s 2007 survey revealed that 951,486 organizations around the world have implemented ISO 9001, and 154,572 organizations have implemented ISO 14001.

Other widely used ISO management system standards around the world include ISO/IEC 27001 for information security management, ISO 22000 for food safety management and ISO/TS 16949 for the automotive sector. Non-ISO management system standards include OHSAS 18001 for occupational health and safety management.

If your company has decided to use one or more of the standards to help develop its management system, why go for third-party certifi cation? Certification primarily aims to give confidence to both fi rms and their stakeholders, which include customers and society, in their systems and processes. Roger states that many buyers of products and services now specify that their suppliers must be certifi ed to a number of different standards and without that certification, they cannot trade.

Vince Desmond, executive director of business development at CQI, elaborates: “Among other things, management system certifi cation should provide purchasing organizations with the confidence that suppliers are going to provide them with products or services to an agreed standard. It assures them that the risks to that delivery have been identifi ed or managed.”

Risk management plays a signifi cant role, adds Catherine Golds, head of certifi cation body, NQA. She says management systems certification is
“about reducing risk, avoiding the supply of bad products, risk to the environment, reducing risk of ill health in the workplace and all the associated claims against organizations because of this”. She adds: “This is about companies demonstrating credibility.”

But management systems certification also offers opportunities for fi rms to improve their systems and identify weaknesses that need correction, according to Neil Hannah, global operations director at another certification body, BSI. “No organization wants to have processes that fail to provide the desired outcome, whether it is in product quality, environmental performance or health and safety management.”

Certifi cation can also bring fi nancial benefits. Neil says that fi rms should be able to improve their own quality management and, with that, improve performance as well as, in some cases, realise fi nancial benefits. He says: “There is a considerable body of evidence that ISO 9001 registered organizations outperform the rest of the market across a wide range of fi nancial and other metrics.”