Quality Evaluation Center

Can make a huge difference. Let's consider two different types of providers: 1- Those that provide you a part of your process. You use this providers becase of optimizacion, they're expertise or for logistic reasons (or any other). Each time this provider fails, you fail and have failed. You are responsible for your scope but you are also responsible for those outside your scope boundary that are choosen by you. 2- Those that provide you as support of your activity. This are the companies that do not put value directly on your product. But they do it indirectly. Imagine that you run a training company. First type of providers (those that provide directly to your process) may be: classroom and external trainers. If any of this fail, you failed. If the classroom does't have chairs for your client to seat for a full day of training, you won't be able to say: It's not our fault. If the trainer doesn't have a clue of what it's supposed to be teached you c...

When we talk with companies management and refer ISO14001 and it's certification, they usualy say: "Our client is not asking for that, so we don't need it". A few points the need to be highlighted: 1- You do need it. Your children will  need it even more. It's a question of responsability and sustainability 2- If the client doesn't ask for it, you should demand for it. Why? Let's see: Consider that some part of the environmental damage is made with the consumption of energy and resources. Most of them don't come for free. If they cost money and you waste them, you waste money. Let's see a real situation. Ours!!! 2 years ago we had an environmental target to reduce our consumption of diesel fuel. A reduction of diesel consumption gives us both a cost reduction and an environmental impact reduction. So we took a near 200.000 km car, that was ready for replacement and changed it for a new one. The old car had an average fuel consumption of ...

This happened to me a few years ago while doing an ISO9001 Certification audit. This company we were auditing had a phone operator. This person spent the day registering the incoming phone calls. Everyday this person filled 2 full  pages with contacts coming in. It was something like: "9:00h - Phone call to manager 9:02h - Someone dialled the wrong number 9:02h - Someone called and asked to talk to Joe 9:03h - The person that called before called back. Something related with a bad connection on the person mobile phone so this person asked me to connect to Joe again. 9:15h - (...)" you get the picture In the audit I asked this phone operator if he could handle easly the volume of phone calls. The answer was: "Yes, not a problem. Sometimes I may get 2 calls at the same time but I always call back and never had a problem". The second question was if there was any other problem related with the phone calls (someone keeping missing phone calls, someone having to...

This is something that comes to our mind once in a while. As a Certification Body and working hard on the ISO9001 certification, we asked ourselfs: could our clients just go for Self Certification. Well, they could. But it would not be the same thing. If self certification ever becomes a reality, how many companies do you know that would state: "we are not good enough!"? Let's get real. Without a 3rd party verifying that companies are reliable you would live permanently in fear for what you were purshasing being compliante. Having this said, certification is a trend do keep in the next few years. Any doubts about it. At QEC - Quality Evaluation Center, we can give you some more hints on how to take your company to the next level as a certified company. Just search for our contact details at our webpage: www.qec-global.com.

... does not exist. As a Certification Body for standards like ISO9001:2015, we see a lot of approaches for Risk Analysis Risk analysis may be done according to standards like ISO31000 or Ferma or non. But in every one of this standards or approaches, one thing is clear: your Risk Analysis shall be adequate to the type of business/company and the impact of the activity being developed. From a matrix to a SWOT analysis, any methodology is acceptable. One remark: while doing a risk analysis, you should consider negative and positive risks. Need more information on Risk Analisys? Send us an email. We at QEC - Quality Evalaution Center  will be delighted to talk with you. Search our contacts on or webpage: www.qec-global.com

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, organizations need competent, motivated, creative, and leadership-minded people. People can become capital gains within organizations by adding something more to the company by being competitive against the competition. When we talk about recruiting, we want to find the right person and put it in the right place. But how do we know if it's the right person? Recruiting a new individual to our organization can bring a positive impact but can also have a negative impact. Achieving the quality of recruitment can be essential in determining the effectiveness of the recruitment process. Recently, the ISO / TS 30411: 2018 Human Resources Management - Metric Contracting Quality was published. The quality of hiring metrics is critical to determining the effectiveness of the recruitment process and has a consequent impact on an organization's performance. We must not forget that quality is defined by the customer and depends on th...

The best answer ever: Yes and No. We, as a Certification Body, frequently see people in panic because of failing they're objectives.  They think that will get in trouble in our audit because they're Management System is not 100% accurate. Well, just relax (but not too much). When you define your objective, you must define your plan to achieve it. If you fail you need to make an analysis of way you failed. And then act over the cause of your failure. If you do this steps, it's ok to fail. But, if period after period you keep failing, that would mean you are not realistic, you don't analyse correctly the failures or you don't have a clue on the Organisation Context. And that is Not Ok. We at QEC - Quality Evaluation Center would be delighted to hear your thoughts on this. Drop us an email. Our contacts are on our webpage: www.qec-global.com

Tricky question. Straight answer: YES. But it depends on you. A Quality Management System can generate finantial benefit in, at least, 3 ways: 1- Improving your process. By optimising your processes, you will reduce non quality costs, increase productivity, decrease or eliminate complaints and others. Obviously that this is not achieved by having a good documental control. You need to gain knowledge of your management system and improve it, takee it to the next level. You need to measure it (in a serious way) and do very efective Corrective Actions. 2- Getting more clients. Once a company certified by us said during an audit that they had not gained any client since they had certification. The one million dollar question was: What have you done to spread to the market that you are certified? It's not only a certification issued by QEC- Quality Evaluation Center. It's by any other Certification Body. If you don't tell people won't guess. 3- Manage based on Risk. ...

Ever had this feeling? That's because you are failing on your root cause. We do see this a lot when we are auditing companies searching for Management Systems Certification (Quality, Environment, Occupational Health and Safety or others). Every time you get a complaint or a Non Conformance situation, you must treat it on your management system. In order to be effective on the Corrective Action, you must identify the root cause. If you fail on the root cause, you will be solving something that it's not the cause of your problem. A simple way to do it? 5 Why's. In the 5 Why's approach, you ask 5 times: why did this happen? The first time, you get an answer. Then you ask why the result of the answer happened. If you do this up to 5 times, it's likelly you get the root cause. If you treat it conveniently, you probabilly won't do it again. If you have any questions on this, get in touch with us. Our contacts are available in www.qec-global.com.

Never heard nothing like this. Did you? Management systems tend (incorrectly) to be seen as a lot of paperwork. That is wrong. Management systems standards are developed by people working in the field. They promote the best practices in order to control and develop some kind of purpose. ISO45001 is the ISO standard that camed to replace OHSAS18001. This standard was developed to give organisations a guideline to develop they're Occupational Health and Safety. In other words, for organisations to reduce and control the risk for workers. Are you a worker? ISO45001 was develped for your company to proctect you. You should demand your employee to have one and have a certification of it. At the end of the day, it's your life that is in stake. If you want to discuss any further this subject, drop an email. Our contacts can be found at our webpage: www.qec-global.com

Remeber 25th of May? Everybody said that the world might be near it's end due to the Data Protection Regulation in the EU. Guess what: the world didn't end. The Data Protection Regulation was created for us, consumers, to be protect from the missuse of our data for purposes different from those that generated the data collection. This means that if a company collects our data to provide us a service like, let's say, repairing a kitchen oven, they could not call us back to sell us a vacuum cleaner. And those that collect our data should protect it from missuse. As protection for missues, consider that our data shall not be available, for instance, on they're website. That is Data Protection. Everyday, on our certification audits, we see companies that, in panic hired consulting companies that claim to be the Data Protection Gurus and force them to take some actions. Most of this actions are wrong. Today I took my youngest kid to scholl. There is a log the parents m...

Today I was auditing an ISO9001+ISO14001 Management System. This company has a big client that demands to handle directly all the waste generated in the activity, to ensure that environmental aspects are kept under control. So, this company I was auditing basicaly provides the services. It's kind of hard to define environmental targets this way. But this company is highly commited to environmental aspects. How can they handle this? Like every other activity, just because you are on the services side, doesn't mean you don't have a severe impact on the environmental side. You always have an impact, although it may not be a direct impact. Look at your providers. Each time they provide you something, most likely they have an environmental impact. And they have it to support and provide to your "services" activity. So indirectly you also have environmental impact. The impact is there and was made for you. Just because you take the Bus to go to work, doesn't...

Many times, people complaint about businesses they deal with. Failed deadlines and non conformance product are the most common problems. But what did they do to avoid it? If I can recall, Einstein once said something like this: "if you keep doing the same things, you will keep getting the same results". This works for both sides. When a provider fails you, if they don't change anything, they will keep failing. If they don't fail you, then you were lucky. Jut that... lucky. If you keep trusting a provider based on the promisse to comply, you will kepp a high risk exposure on your purchase. What should change? That's easy. People should not relly based on promisses. They should look for independent evaluation for a supplier, like ISO9001 certification. And companies shall adopt management systems (ISO or others) to correct they're failures. Imagine this: with a few hunder euro/dolar I can create in a couple of hours a company to provide you... alternativ...

All over the world, we assist to the trend of developing non disciminatory practices. In fact, it makes perfect sense. No one should be discriminated based on gender, religious believes, race, sexual orientation or any other reason. Is your business based on selling "Gender" (we hope not)? No? So you should focus on competence instead of gender. In your business, the sexual orientation of the employye is provided as a service (again we hope it's not)? No? So you should focus on competence instead of sexual orientation. Why should you focus on competence? Because it's competence your business sells to the client. Not the "discriminated" features. They are not related!!! But what if you are obligated to develop a Policy of Non Discrimination? If you develop this Policy, you are assuming that this discriminatory features are in fact considered in your company and therefore you had to make the rule to control it. In the end you are discriminating. You w...

That is a good question. We would ask another question. How did ever achieved them? In our audits, we frequently find management systems that define a specific objective (it's even measurable) but in the end of the measuring period this objective is not achieved. The organisation performs an analisys on the deviation and it's always market related or something like that. Most of the times it's not. So, what is happening? Let's see one of the most commons objectives: increase sales by 10%. That sounds good. Everybody wants to have it increased and 10% is a good number. But why not 20%. That's even better. Let's get crazy: 100%. What is missing here? First: you must be realistic. Is 10% realistic? And 100%? It depends. What happening in your market? What is your market share? On what data did you based your decision? So, first thing, get realistic data. You may wish 10% but is it realistic? With realistic data on hand you can even verify that in specific ci...

We often go to places where food is being manipulated and find people wearing gloves. Why do they do this? The main reason is: for our safety. Handling food directly with your hands it's half way to have it contamined and spread diseases. Using gloves could even reduce the riks involved in someone handling our food without a proper hand hygiene. But, is it really safe? Unfortunetly no. Gloves tend to create a fake sense of safety. People often believe that they can do anything if wearing gloves. As a result, on a daily basis we see people handling food with a glove and then collecting money wearing the same glove (or even worst things). In they're mind they are doing it ok and are safe. But in fact, that are doing something wrong that will cause contamination on our food. Every time you see this happen, call the attention to this person and/or supervisor and reject the food. It's your health. It's your safety. If you want to learn more about this subject get ...

Often we Audit management systmes that lack of measurement. Most of the times, this lack of measument means that the system only measures Quality Objectives. How many measurements should you be dealing with? When you set up your management systems, you should point to at least 2 levels of measument 1- You must define the Quality Objectives. They are the little steps you take in order to comply with the Quality Policy you have defined in the first place. Let's take as an example that your Quality Objective to comply with the customer satisfaction mentioned in the Quality Policy is to increase the customer satisfaction from 80% to 85%. First: why 85%? Don't you want 100%? Well, when you define 85% instead of 100% you should be aware of your limitations and your processes. Rome wasn't build in a day so you should be realistic. So realisticly your objective shall be to improve what is improvable at that specific time frame. So, we define 85% and wait until the end of ...

Well, this question should not even be asked. Of course they are related. For 2 main reasons: because the ISO9001:2015 (and previous as well) say so and because it makes sense. Why does it make sense? Let´s see: The Quality Policy is, as refered before, a compromisse you asume in your organisation. Now, if it is a long term compromisse, it´s also a path to follow. Now imagine a long road. You are going to follow this road to reach some place. To do this road you need… steps. So, the Policy, as the path you will follow is the road. And, as you can now guess, the steps are your objectives. Objectives shall be defined as the short or medium term achievement of the Policy. If you need any clarification on this subject, at QEC - Quality Evaluation Center we will be delighted to share some ideas with you. You can get our contact information on our webpage www.qec-global.com

Many times we get questioned about the importance of the Quality Policy. Is it really important? Will it make a difference in the organisation Management System? The truth is: the Quality Policy is THE commitment and the way the organisation is oriented. If you fail to define the basis your Management Systems is likely to fail as well. See it as the reason why you are setting up the Management System. Obviously you can develop a Management System with a wrong or weak Quality Policy. But what is the point? Could a Company achieve it´s goal without defining a Quality Policy (or a Management System)? Well, yes but as son as there is a Goal, the road to the Goal is already a Quality Policy. The Quality Policy in the Management System according to ISO9001:2015 must exist as a documented information. But as important (or more important) then the documented information, it shall be understood by everyone. It´s not worth to have it written without people knowing it or understanding it. ...

What does it really mean? Is it just for big companies? The answer is no - It's not just for big companies. A management systems, to make it simple, it's a set of consistent procedures that exist in a certain activity, so the final output is achieved also in a consistent way. Some companies may already have a management system without even knowing it. Others just "go with the wind" and don't have a constant or consistent way to act. This last type of companies don't have a management system. A company does not have to be BIG in order to have a consistent way to do it's daily work.  In fact, we do have some 1 or 2 working people companies as clients that run with a consistent Management Systems and even have them certified. And they do it quite well. ISO establishes some good practices and guidelines for companies that want to develop and improvement they're management systems. For instance, one that is considered a basic management system is ISO900...

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