Question

Discuss the benefits to a buying company of certifying its suppliers. Describe the benefits to a supplier of being certified.

Answer 1

In today’s business environment, which is full of financial turbulence, eroding bottom lines, decreasing efficiencies, and changing requirements, these reasons are far less relevant. Management systems are sometimes misunderstood by senior management as nothing more than a heavy administrative burden: difficult to implement and providing no business benefit or improvement. What they don’t understand is that your management system is a way of providing continuity throughout your operations. It’s the link between policy, performance, objectives, and targets.

Your management system is more than a manual, and more than the certificate on the wall. It’s a critical tool that will help you meet requirements (customer, regulatory, and legal), minimize risks, strengthen your market position, protect the brand, focus on the customer, improve organizational efficiency, and reduce costs. Following are five specific benefits that your management systems certification provides.

1. Strengthen leadership

These are no longer just “ISO” systems. Management systems should be the tools most used by senior managers, not only by quality or environmental experts. Therefore, give your senior management team feedback that speaks their language and addresses their needs. Provide the framework to ensure action plans are developed and monitored, and that corrective action is initiated when targets and business objectives are not being met.

2. Improve efficiencies

Analyze your management system’s design and assess its effectiveness to meet current and future challenges, not past requirements of ISO management system standards. In doing so, you give senior managers the tools to see where there is overcapacity, and provide them with the insight they need to make the right adjustments relative to your organization’s needs.

To accomplish this, consider the following actions:
• Review process metrics against business objectives and the current economic environment.
• Use internal process assessments to focus less on compliance and more on process improvements.
• Incorporate applicable improvement tools, such as Six Sigma or lean, into the overall management system.
• Integrate your quality, environmental, and health and safety management systems into a single integrated management system.
• Extend your learning to the entire supply chain and your business partners.

3. Mitigate business risk

When you conduct internal and external system assessments, highlight the effect on business risk. Ensure that your management system is inclusive of all processes, including legal compliance, finance, environmental programs, and especially health and safety. Periodically review the responsibilities and competence of personnel.

4. Exceed customer requirements

Use your management system to integrate customer requirements into every aspect of the business. Plan-do-check-act (PDCA) and problem-solving techniques can help you to gather, analyze, and act on customers’ needs and perceptions—not just their complaints. Share your best practices with your customers, and request the same from them.

5. Quantify and improve the return on audits

When you transition from compliance to risk-based auditing, you can do more with less and spend more time on fewer processes by focusing on high-risk, bottom-line, and customer-facing activities. By understanding what the internal customer and the process owner needs, you can ask the right questions at the beginning of the audit. The audit results should include quantifiable improvements and actionable recommendations, including an evaluation of resources.