Attaining ISO9001 certification is a major achievement for any business. To ensure continued certification, your company must maintain the highest standards and demonstrate commitment to the quality principles. This means that the company must follow the quality principles of; customer focus, leadership, involvement of people, applying a process and system approach to management, continual improvement, making decisions based on facts and mutually beneficial supplier relationships.
The PCG ISO 9001 scheme requires member companies to initiate and accept internal audits annually. The aim of these audits is to provide your company with feedback that will support efforts toward continual improvement of the quality management system. It cannot and will not be the only source of improvement effort. Your company must review and act on, performance and achievements against the set quality policy and the quality objectives. The suitability of the quality management system and the quality policy must also be reviewed regularly as must the requirements of clients and customers. In addition the company must take into account the statutory and regulatory requirements of the supplied services and products.
The PCG ISO 9001 scheme provides the scheme member company with a structure and tools to simplify and enable these processes. These are:
- An electronic repository or electronic file for mandatory documents and records,
- Templates for recording the mandatory processes including but not limited to a Management Review Template, a Risk Assessment template, a Prospects template, a Training and Employee Development template, Objectives template, Pre-Audit checklist and an Issue Tracker,
- A Quality Manual Document template,
- A Quality Policy and
- Procedural Documents.
It is expected that prior to the annual internal audit at least two annual management reviews will have been completed since the last internal audit and the pre-audit checklist completed. This in turn should ensure that the issues database and the other template records have been completed along with other tasks critical to sustaining the quality management system.
