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Subject:Re. Pros(e) and cons of ISO 9000 From:Geoff Hart <geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> Date:Mon, 24 Apr 1995 09:02:59 LCL
Gary Gray wrote to criticize the ISO 9000 documents he'd seen, and
undoubtedly with some justification. However, it's worthwhile noting
that the real benefit from ISO 9000 (apart from marketing/p.r.
benefits) is that it forces you to take a long, hard look at what
you've been doing for the last year, decade or century.
Anyone who's ever tried to teach a complex subject to students of any
age quickly learns an important fact of life: You really don't
understand something until you can explain it to someone else. (Then,
if you're an engineer, that someone else rewrites it comprehensibly!
<grin>) In the case of ISO, lots of companies find that trying to
document and justify the way they do business points out serious
workflow problems and some of the just-plain-idiocies that evolve over
time, with no good justification. Correcting these problems often pays
back the effort invested in the certification process. Bureaucracies
in particular could benefit from such analysis.
--Geoff Hart #8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Disclaimer: These comments are my own and don't represent the opinions
of the Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada.
