Typically a small business, say 5 employees, single location, will need to invest about £5k plus some of their own time to gain certification against ISO 9001 – is it worth the investment?
Here’s a few reasons why it may be.
First, let me state I am not independent here, I make money from helping companies to gain ISO certification. I’ve been involved with certification, ISO standards and quality management for about 40 years. That said, I run a small company, and have done for over 15 years. Three employees and a few sub-contracted services, I know about the sharks out there, I’ve paid for SEO that didn’t work, I’ve joined “clubs” to bring in new customers, but didn’t, and numerous agencies contact me every week wanting to save me cash on mobile phones, land lines, broadband, energy, water etc. which is very charitable of them………
But getting back to the point, you’re a small business, you’ve managed to trade for a year or two, turned a small profit. Now you want to grow and you’ve heard of ISO certificates, should you go for it?
My first question would be why do you want to? If you’ve never been asked if you have a certificate I’d tend to say don’t bother, certification isn’t mandatory or popular in all markets. If your customers don’t expect certification and it’s not a regulatory requirement, then why invest in it? Keep trading and listening but if nobody mentions it save the cash. Being certified doesn’t usually bring in new customers on its own.
If your competitors are all certified, customers ask about your certificates, or you do a lot of tendering then the answer has to be YES. You’ll never be taken seriously in a market place where everyone else has a certificate and you don’t, so in those markets you just have to accept that the cost of certification is your “entrance fee”.
Tendering is a major driver for certification against all the ISO Management System standards. Taking ISO 14001 and environmental management as a typical example, tenders from many purchasing bodies have numerous questions about how a business affects the environment. Finding the information to answer them can take days. In most cases if you have an ISO 14001 certificate you just provide it, skip answering those questions and gain the maximum marks. So, with tendering certification can save hours of senior management time, which after all is expensive, and as tenders have a habit of turning up with short response times an ISO certificate can be the difference between getting the tender in on time or losing the opportunity.
Environmental impact, Health and Safety, product/service compliance and now the security of information within your business can be backed by legislation and regulations. A good ISO Management System will help ensure the business remains compliant with legislation, avoiding fines etc. Even if the worst happens, a serious accident or causing serious pollution, the existence of a certified ISO management system is good evidence that Director’s responsibilities have been properly discharged and given appropriate importance. In today’s legislative atmosphere this could keep Directors and business owners out of jail. That alone must be worth £5k!
A final point; some companies invest in certification to improve disciplines and help establish consistent approaches to particular tasks or processes. This does work and certification should bring improvements of this type. However, the real solution to getting people to work consistently remains internal discipline – having external auditors visit once a year won’t really make your staff follow the same process all the time. Similarly, if its widely believed that a company’s senior management team don’t really care how a job is done as long as they get paid, then an ISO management system isn’t really going to be much help. An accepted fact is that if any system isn’t supported and followed by those who lead it, then it cannot really succeed.
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