ISO 9001 Consultant

What exactly is ISO 9001 standard and why ISO 9001 certification is necessary? This is a common question for a majority of the organizations when they want to initiate ISO 9001 implementation project. ISO 9001 standard provides a set of requirements which improves business processes, customer satisfaction and quality of output while minimizing customer complaints, cost, risk and rework. The ISO 9001 standard can be hard to understand by a layman with no prior background of a quality management system due to various factors like terminologies used etc. and a company may require a person who can interpret it as applicable to the organization. And here comes the role of ISO 9001 consultant, who helps organization in applying these requirements in the business processes. It is imperative to understand that what exactly is missing between your current practices of business and ISO 9001 standards. ISO 9001 consulting will assist you in knowing alignment between your existing procedures, documentations with requirements of the standard.

Consultants who are well versed with the knowledge of ISO standards with adequate ISO 9001 training for knowing what exactly quality management system is and how to implement it in a business will have extensive expertise and experience in relevant field for helping a lot of organizations across business domains. An appropriate ISO consultant from Effivity Technology, Inc can fuel up business efficiencies, quality and optimize processes for accelerating customer satisfaction and augmenting customer base. So, it is vital for a company or organization looking to get the best out of ISO 9001 implementation to hire a QMS consultants for better management of the entire implementation life cycle.

Now, the question is how to get ISO 9001 certified? There are some steps for the same, let’s take a look.

• Subscribe to an appropriate package of Effivity depending on number users and team size.
• Utilize online training options and help videos to understand the software and how various requirements of the standard can be addressed by our comprehensive 12 modules. If required online / onsite consultation is available for organizations.
• Carry out a gap analysis to understand your current system and process maturity.
• Make employees aware of company’s quality management system and how it is related with ISO 9001.
• Define proper access policy for various employees and start working on various modules covering HR, purchase, quality, risk and opportunities, context, sales, design and development, non-conformity, internal audit, management review, documented information etc.
• Conduct internal audit and management review.
• Close all findings of the internal audit and review QMS compliance again with free advice provided by Effivity’s expert ISO consultants.
• Select certification body (CB). CB will then be a long-term partner of the company which is looking for certification due to frequent surveillance audits.
• Go for pre-assessment. CB won’t be able to consult an organization but can render some advice for the preparation of audit.
• Decide time for documentation review, as it is must. It is the first step towards registration process and will require documentations like quality manual and other top-level procedures.
• The next step is registration audit. It involves intense review and assessment of company’s QMS. Number of auditors and days of audit depends on the size of firm and complexity of processes.
• Auditors may identify deviations in the QMS and a report may be created for the same. Company needs to respond to it with action plans for correcting them.
• Accept registration certificate.
• Maintain your system using Effivity so that your yearly surveillance audits are hassle free and effective. All the information for the whole year available in the system at a click of the button.
• After every three years recertification audits will be conducted for another cycle of ISO 9001 certification.
• ISO 9001 certification cost depends on the size and number of employees in the company. While you may not have control over ISO 9001 audit fees charged by the certification bodies but you can certainly control and optimize your expenses on implementation and consulting services. Effivity offers subscription for QMS modules for 19 US $ a month to make sure a world class QMS software is available to every organization with practically no initial investment otherwise associated with this kind of software products.

Apart from all the discussions about consultants, training, certification and cost of ISO 9001, one indispensable parameter which requires attention is compliance management software, which takes care of implantation and maintenance of ISO certification in an effective manner. Yes, it’s Effivity. Invest your time on core business procedures and leave all the tedious job of documentation and form filling on Effivity. This cloud based software always keeps the organization ready for audits. During audits, company needs to demonstrate compliance and fulfilment of all requirements / audit parameters, Effivity enables timely update, regular update, compliances can be addressed from any location as it is a cloud based software, help at module level and page level ensures ISO 9001 becomes a part of the organizational culture for avoiding hectic situation during pre-audit week / days. There are millions of companies which are ISO certified but don’t have a software which can manage and handle the requirements for certification and hence Effivity is a correct match for any organization certified, in the process of implementation / certification or any organization wanting to implement / benchmark an international quality management system.