OT? ISO9000 -- The Big Picture

DSP-Newbie wrote:
> Rune Allnor wrote:
>> On 2 Sep, 10:53, DSP-Newbie <N...@way.invalid> wrote:
>
>> Rune Allnor wrote:
>>
>> Well, that's what the certification agencies are
>> all about; to ensure that whatever is essential
>> to the core business is covered by the certificate.
>>
>
> No, that's exactly my point: the _producing_ company decides about what
> is essential to the core business, not the certifying agency.
>
>
>>> Consider two ISO9000-companies producing olive oil.
>>>
>>> -Company A claims it will guarantee the delivered volume of oil to be
>>> within 0.25% of the volume stated on the bottle.
>>>
>>> -Company B claims the delivered oil will have an acid content lower
>>> then 0.1 %.
>>>
>>> This is an oversimplified example of course, but the point is: there is
>>> no such thing as a ISO9000 master document specifying how olive oil
>>> should be produced.
>>
>> No, but the client can, given the different specs,
>> choose what company to by from. A client who wants
>> the volume to match buys from A, another client who
>> focuses on acid contents buys from B. Both clients
>> have a vastly pwoerful tool to their disposal if
>> the deliveries don't match the specs.
>
> For the simplified olive oil example: yes, but for products with many
> dozens of core properties/qualities/specs etc..., it becomes a daunting
> task to decide on which is "best".
>
>
>>> Finally: after *everybody* has implemented it, ISO9000 becomes rather
>>> worthless.
>>
>> Why?
>>
>
> The main reason for companies to implement ISO9000 was/is to be ahead of
> the competition: "We are ISO9000-certified, thus we make a better
> product". Untrue of course, but its a strong marketing argument...

A few have done that, but most seem to have done it under pressure from
their customers. I remember first doing ISO9000 stuff in the UK when it
basically became a requirement to do any business in mobile radio, and
every supplier frantically scrambled for certification in parallel.

As you say, the core problem is ISO9000 means whatever the certified
company says it means. "We ship any old crap, whether working or not,
built to any sloppy tolerances" is basically a valid ISO9000 document.

SEI certification is a worse sham, as you don't even need a rubber stamp
from a certifying agency. The CMM documents make the nature of the SEI
levels fairly clear, but without oversight implementation has become a
farce. There are lots of SEI 5 companies in India. None of them seem the
slightest bit concerned about stating they are level 5, when anyone who
has read the CMM documents knows it has to be bogus. Most commercial
companies would be crazy to be real level 5.

Steve

Rune Allnor wrote:
> On 2 Sep, 12:01, DSP-Newbie <N...@way.invalid> wrote:
>> Rune Allnor wrote:
>>> On 2 Sep, 10:53, DSP-Newbie <N...@way.invalid> wrote:
>
>>>> Finally: after *everybody* has implemented it, ISO9000 becomes rather
>>>> worthless.
>>> Why?
>> The main reason for companies to implement ISO9000 was/is to be ahead
>> of the competition: "We are ISO9000-certified, thus we make a better
>> product". Untrue of course, but its a strong marketing argument...-
>
> I heard that said about quality: "We are better than
> the competition because we focus on quality."
>
> At some point quality *was* a marketing issue and a
> competitive point. Not so anymore, because companies
> in a true competition who do *not* make quality
> products will die. These days, if you want to play,
> you have to make a quality product. Or somebody
> else will, and take your customers away from you.

Not so. In many sectors only price matters. Being 1 cent costlier that
the others will kill you, but quality is of secondary importance.

> Same thing with ISO9000. If you don't use it for
> what it is intended for, your company will die.

Can you cite supporting argument. This sounds good, but it doesn't match
the real world.

> ISO9000 was intended as a tool to ensure that
> managment has a clue what is going on in the

Actually it came from defence contracting in the UK. Anyone who has been
involved in that will know the first priority is inefficiency, not
quality. Inefficiency is what maximises income in defence work, so
ISO9000 is heavy on paperwork.

> company. Once the clients realize that -- and
> use it as a leverage -- they may actually force
> a contractor into submission. Losing an ISO
> certification -- whatever one might think of the
> certificate as such -- is not a very tempting
> proposition.

You'd have to be dumb to loose certification. It takes effort to learn
how to play the ISO9000 game. Once you have, maintaining certification
should be easy.

Steve

On 2 Sep, 12:24, Steve Underwood <ste...@dis.org> wrote:
> Rune Allnor wrote:

> > Same thing with ISO9000. If you don't use it for
> > what it is intended for, your company will die.
>
> Can you cite supporting argument. This sounds good, but it doesn't match
> the real world.

Hypothetical situation: Client is pissed off because some
service is late on schedule and crappy once delivered.
Contractor argues that "it is impossible to hire
competent staff these days" or something similar.

Client: "On what grounds did you bid fro the contract?
You stated that you were able to deliver commodity
which pass test X in time frame Y. You are an ISO
certified company. If you claim that you could meet
the contract, you will have a set of procedures to
that effect. Let's have a look at them."

The contractor is left with three options:

1) Deliver to spec on time
2) Re-negotiate the contract
3) Admit that he is unable to honor the contract

If he does 1) everybody are happy. 2) is a very
unlikely option once the client has become grumpy,
so the question is how to deal with 3), admittance
to not being able to honor the contract.

Of course, some of those sorts of discussions
will end up in court of law, but that's a very
powerful weapon which ought not to be used too
often. However, if the client plays the ISO
certificate card wisely, he can apply pressure
early on in a way which contractor managent
percieve as uncomfortable and might act upon.

Rune

Rune Allnor wrote:

> Client: "On what grounds did you bid fro the contract?
> You stated that you were able to deliver commodity
> which pass test X in time frame Y. You are an ISO
> certified company. If you claim that you could meet
> the contract, you will have a set of procedures to
> that effect. Let's have a look at them."


When entering ISO9000, it is of the utmost importance to very, very
carefully think about the figures you'll be stating. It would be
completely insane to mention "guaranteed" delivery times.

A client looking into a manufacturer's internal 9600 procedures? Forget
it, the competetion might be listening in...

Steve Underwood <steveu@dis.org> writes:

> If a company takes production quality seriously, and will have more
> efficient systems than ISO9000 in place. After all these years, far
> too many people still think ISO9000 is about improvement. With so
> little understanding of what the goals of ISO9000 really are, I guess
> its not too surprising that it gets applied in such a screwed up way.

Yes, even in the ISO space, there are various updates / changes /
equivalents / predecessors to ISO 9000:

http://herdingcats.typepad.com/photo...d/cmmi_map.gif

And most of them appear to not necessarily have much to do with
quality.

Actually, that's not quite true: if a company delivers high quality
products, they are probably doing many of the things that these
process methodologies espouse... but just because a company is doing
these processes doesn't necessarily mean their products are high
quality.

If a company _continues_ to use such things with an eye to improving
the quality of their products, then product quality should
improve... but this is just a relative improvement, it says nothing
about the absolute level of quality.

To achieve high absolute quality, you need to tie internal company
metrics with best-in-class (or world class) performance. Sometimes
that's hard, though, because different companies use different metrics
on the same processes... and even if they use the same metrics, the
numbers themselves are often (always?) company proprietary.

Ciao,

Peter K.

--
"And he sees the vision splendid
of the sunlit plains extended
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars."

DSP-Newbie <No@way.invalid> writes:

> When entering ISO9000, it is of the utmost importance to very, very
> carefully think about the figures you'll be stating. It would be
> completely insane to mention "guaranteed" delivery times.

One thing that customers usually (always?) appreciate is on-time
delivery.

Customer: I'll have today's paper, please!
Newsagent: That's $1.25, and I'll deliver it sometime next week.

Ciao,

Peter K.

--
"And he sees the vision splendid
of the sunlit plains extended
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars."

Peter K. wrote:

...

"And he sees the vision splendid
of the sunlit plains extended
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars."


Is that the original scansion? I think I remember

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,

And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.


Jerry
--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

Peter K. wrote:
> DSP-Newbie <No@way.invalid> writes:
>
>> When entering ISO9000, it is of the utmost importance to very, very
>> carefully think about the figures you'll be stating. It would be
>> completely insane to mention "guaranteed" delivery times.
>
> One thing that customers usually (always?) appreciate is on-time
> delivery.
>

Sure, but how can this be specified in an ISO9000-context??
"Delivery will take place at noon, on the Nth working day after receipt
of order"? What if a severe blizzard/hurricane/whatever makes
transportation by road/rail/air impossible?

A factory producing steel bearing balls OTOH, could specify that:
"99.0 % of balls produced will have a diameter within 0.001 mm of
specification". The customer knows he can expect 1% outliers.

Rule #1 in ISO9000: do not specify requirements that cannot be met (all
of the time) or you will be in deep trouble.

Jerry Avins <jya@ieee.org> writes:

> Peter K. wrote:
>
> ...
>
> "And he sees the vision splendid
> of the sunlit plains extended
> And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars."
>
>
> Is that the original scansion? I think I remember
>
> And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
> In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
>
> And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
> And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.

:-)

Probably not. At one stage the poem was sung as a song and they broke
the "vision splendid" line.

This seems to be the original poem, or at least a quick comparison
with my hard copy says it is:

http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/wo...yoverflow.html

I went with the split because I first heard that particular 'Banjo'
Patterson poem as the song.

Ciao,

Peter K.

--
"And he sees the vision splendid
of the sunlit plains extended
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars."

DSP-Newbie wrote:
> Peter K. wrote:
>> DSP-Newbie <No@way.invalid> writes:
>>
>>> When entering ISO9000, it is of the utmost importance to very, very
>>> carefully think about the figures you'll be stating. It would be
>>> completely insane to mention "guaranteed" delivery times.
>>
>> One thing that customers usually (always?) appreciate is on-time
>> delivery.
>>
>
> Sure, but how can this be specified in an ISO9000-context??
> "Delivery will take place at noon, on the Nth working day after receipt
> of order"? What if a severe blizzard/hurricane/whatever makes
> transportation by road/rail/air impossible?
>
> A factory producing steel bearing balls OTOH, could specify that:
> "99.0 % of balls produced will have a diameter within 0.001 mm of
> specification". The customer knows he can expect 1% outliers.
>
> Rule #1 in ISO9000: do not specify requirements that cannot be met (all
> of the time) or you will be in deep trouble.

There are no rules you cannot fail to comply with. That's fundamental.
Set a tolerance, and one day even the best run business will screw up
and make a batch out of spec. ISO9000 rules should basically be
codifying what will be the case anyway, if they don't exist. As Peter
mentioned, a newspaper publisher failing to get newspapers to the stands
on time has severe consequences, whether or not they have put
commitments about such delivery in an ISO9000 document. Putting such
commitments in their ISO9000 document makes sense from everyone's point
of view. Its simply saying "we are very serious about this point,
because a failure is a severe problem for both vendor and customer alike".

You can make sane rules, which are accomodating of outside factors. "We
will ship on time" is a reasonable commitment. A failure there is
usually the company's fault, and they should reasonably face the
consequences. "We will deliver on time" may be reasonable, if the
commitment has sane caveats like "as long as there is no typhoon at that
time".

Regards,
Steve