QIC Guru

If your company is preparing to become ISO 9001 certified, you should know what you need and what you don’t need. Some companies are overzealous and become obsessed with over-documenting their systems, rather than focusing on what their procedures actually are and documenting them. While ISO 9001 requires documented procedures, the standard doesn’t specify what they should include or how they should be formatted. The fact that many companies miss is that a third-party auditor will not be concerned with the format, but rather with the content of the procedures and how closely they align with what the company actually does.

Documents should be written to define a company’s processes, not to make processes sound more impressive than they are. A common nonconformance found in an ISO audit is not that a company was unable to meet a standard’s requirement, but its inability to meet a requirement in one of its own documents. A company can essentially sabotage itself by over-thinking its documentation. ISO 9001:2008 requires a manual and six documented procedures. Fulfill those requirements; other written procedures are unnecessary.