Is it an insult to say that it's documented

Business901 Podcast Transcription
Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

Is it an insult to say
that it's documented?
Guest was LJ Nichols

Related Podcast:
Can there be a marriage between
ISO and Lean?

Can there be a marriage between ISO and Lean?
Copyright Business901


Lindsay Jackson Nichols discussed the business benefits of ISO
Certification and how it can be used in conjunction with
continuous improvement. Lindsay is the CEO of MOCG, a
management consulting firm specializing in implementing process
improvement and ISO based management systems.

At MOCG, they help avoid ISO implementation
problems and frustrations through their
unique ISO Business System Evaluation and
step by step ISO process improvement
methodology. As a natural by-product of the
system they put in place, you will get your ISO
certification. They look for productivity
improvement potential throughout the ISO
process and use ISO as the frame work, rather
than just meeting the minimum requirements
of the ISO standards.

MOCG has developed a Free ISO Advisory Report called “The 10
Biggest Mistakes When Implementing an ISO Quality System and
How To Over Come Them
All”. This ISO report will
educate you on what a quality
system is supposed to do for
your company, approaches to
avoid and how to optimize your
results.


Joe Dager: Welcome everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of
the Business901 podcast. With me today is Lindsay Jackson
Nichols the CEO of MOCG, a management consulting firm
specializing in implementing process improvement and ISO-based
management systems. Lindsay has perfected an approach to
documenting organizations processes and tying them to their
business metrics, making the ISO initiative a compelling value
proposition. Lindsay, you make ISO sound like a marketing
opportunity. Is it?
Lindsay Jackson Nichols: I think it is. I really do believe it is. I
do. Many companies will contact me and it's pretty obvious from
when I ask them why, what's the motivation for doing it? I'm
going to get two very distinct responses: "We have to do it
because our customers want us to" or "Our competitors are all
registered and so we can't be seen to be falling behind." Or they
say "We want to use it as an opportunity to improve what we do."
Typically, it's the latter that I am working with.
Joe: I always look at ISO as more of a standard than a quality
initiative. Can you kind of define the two and maybe explain that
to me?
Lindsay: It is a standard. Sure enough, for anyone that is
unfamiliar with ISO 9001 it kind of predates all the way back to
its origin, the second World War, where the organizations wanted
to make sure that the ammunitions and the planes and
everything else that they were procuring were going to meet
standards so that they could be depended upon to do whatever it
was that they were supposed to do, meeting specifications. These
quality standards were born which set a standard playing field.
Whether you're a small organization in Barcelona, Spain or you're
a service company in Minneapolis, Minnesota there is a common
expectation that you have set protocols and procedures in place.


As a customer to either of those organizations this company
controls the way they procure products and materials. They have
inspection. They can verify what it is that they do and what their
vendors are doing so that their finished product meets their
customer's expectations. So that is essentially the definition of
the quality standard.
Now whether it's an opportunity for an improvement, that's
where the kind of a bone of contention comes into it. There are
many organizations that say it really isn't. It's a standard that
ultimately the finished product doesn't necessarily mean it's a
better one than in an organization that isn't ISO registered.
I suppose you could say there that it's up to the organization to
challenge themselves. Are they looking to meet a minimum
standard, or are they looking to say "While we look internally at
what we do, do we want to say "Where are our gaps? Where is it
that we could be doing better? Where is the interruption in the
flow of data and information between departments and people?
Where are there overlaps, where we've got multiple people
thinking that they should be doing things and that needs to be
more clearly defined."
Joe: When I think of continuous improvement I always think of
Lean or the Six Sigma or maybe some other quality initiatives, I
guess which ISO would fall under. But you're saying that ISO
should be an active tool that is really the basis of your continuous
improvement?
Lindsay: Yes, I think so. You bring up Lean as an example and
the Six Sigma. I think an organization that is thinking about
implementing either of those initiatives is motivated by the desire
to raise the bar on itself, to look for opportunities to improve
internally. They're not necessarily saying "What do our customers
want? Why are we doing it?" I think this is where you've got
these two schools of thinking. A company that's thinking about

doing ISO 9000, generally speaking, is being motivated externally
because they've got organizations that say "You know what? We
don't really have an appetite for change. We just want that
certificate. We want that certificate so that we can show our
customers we are equally as good as our competitors."
I think this is where the distinction is rather than saying "Forget
it; it's not that customers aren't important. But forget about what
the external influences are what do we want to do internally as
the owner of an organization, as the leader of an organization?

What is it that I want to impress upon my people for them to look
at what they do and look for opportunities to do it better, to cross
the functional lines and work together more completely?" And
again, lots of process changes and not just departmental or
product changes.
Joe: Well, when I think of ISO, I mean it's an international
standard. How does that reflect to me if I just do business
basically domestically?
Lindsay: I think again it's just easy for an organization to say,
you know, "I'm a medical device manufacturer. I want to know
that suppliers I choose have got the necessary controls in place.
Do I want to invent something from scratch or do I want to say
what is available to me?" There's an ISO 9001 standard and then
it has a medical derivative, ISO13485, that's got some additional
requirements that are specific to medical applications. I would
rather choose that. It's there, it's consistent, and again it means
that nobody has to develop these company or industry specific
requirements.
Joe: Who certifies me? Who says that I'm ISO compliant?

Lindsay: Every country has an accreditation body. That's
essentially the organization that is responsible for keeping this
ordinance, if you want to look at it that way. So you then have a

group of what we call certification bodies. These are the
registration agencies, the inspectors if you want to think about it
that way that will go from organization to organization and
independently verify whether the company is actually meeting the
ISO requirements. The accreditation body makes sure that those
registration agencies have, again, the internal controls in place to
make sure that they are applying the requirements consistently
and are reporting on the audits consistently. So again everybody
is essentially playing to the same set of rules.
Joe: Can I go wrong putting ISO in? I mean, can it somehow
hurt me as a company? Is there things I should watch out for,
maybe I'm not ready for it or something?
Lindsay: Yes. There's a short answer to that. I'm a consultant,
would you expect me to say anything differently? Of course I'm
going to say yes, you could go wrong. It's going to cost you
millions of dollars. And shame on you. You should have been
thinking more deeply about it.

But if we forget that, forget that I'm a consultant and just look at
the fact that I've been working with companies on the ISO-based
management systems for 20 plus years, what I see over and over
again is an organization that doesn't know what it doesn't know.
So it's saying "OK, well we can do this in a few weeks. This is
easy. Let's just document what we do and get that registration
agency in and everything will be fine." In reality what we're doing
is establishing two sets of operating procedures: the way we
always operate, and the way we think the registration agency
wants to see us operate.
It's a huge burden for that organization to bear. Every person in
sales, in marketing, in purchasing, in production, production
planning, human resources, inspection, shipping, all have to
understand two sets of operating procedures. That's typically
where I see companies go wrong. Instead of looking and saying,

"What makes sense?" Because again, ISO is a standard based on
good business practice.

That's revised every seven to 10 years to say again "How can we
improve this thing?" So that it applies to any type of organization,
whether they're service, whether they're manufacturing, whether
they have five employees, whether they have 5,000 employees.
How can we improve it?
If an organization is serious about it, they're looking and saying
"Let's challenge it." If we need to change because we don't
adequately verify the material that is coming through our docks
to make sure before we add any value to it whatsoever it meets
our requirements, then why would they want to be in business?
If you're going to go wrong, the fact is that you won't challenge it
so that you know that anything that you are wanting to change,
needing to change, needing to implement is adding value and is
strengthening your operating practices.

So if it's doing that the chances are it's easier for you to
institutionalize it, rather than having people say "It makes no
sense. I'm going to do this and then when the registrar comes in
I'm going to present that I am doing my activities in a completely
different way that's ISO compliant." Does that make sense?
Joe: It sounds like it's a continuous improvement process in
itself and with a very well-defined standard. I think most people
consider ISO, that it's just a checklist?
Lindsay: Exactly. That's probably even supported by the fact
that registration agency comes in with a checklist. "We want to
see that you do it this way. We want to see that you do it that
way. Can you show us evidence of how you control
non-conforming products or materials? How you perform
corrective action when that material has been returned by the
customer or that product has been returned by the customer."

And yes, it feels very checklist-like. But when you boil it down
you actually are looking at all of these different processes. In
many cases you want to document them because that's the most
consistent way for people to understand how something should
be performed and most especially for new employees.
So I don't know, is it some insult to say that it's documented? Is
there some insult in some cases to say that there are checklists
to support how things should be performed? I don't think so.
Joe: That's one of the big resistances to Lean is the perception
that you are standardizing all the work and making robots out of
everyone. But standard work is kind of what you're saying that
ISO is all about. It's making work standard. I mean, being explicit
in what it is. And that's not a bad thing because if there is a
deviation from it, it would raise the flag, or in the Lean terms,
someone would pull an Andon cord.
Lindsay: Exactly. You find me one new employee joining an
organization that will ever complain that there is something in
documented form that tells them how they should be performing
something. They cry out for it. But how many times do you hear
people say "Oh yeah, it's baptism by fire here." Nobody likes to
be in that situation. I mean I've been through it myself; it's
disconcerting. People want to be productive; they want to get up
and running fast. What you tend to hear from the more seasoned
people is "Oh, but it's so unique, what we do. There's no way you
could possibly standardize it." Of course that's complete
nonsense. There are certain things, obviously, every order is
different. The flavor of what a customer wants versus the next
one, absolutely.
But there are certain steps that are consistent throughout an
organization and between organizations regardless of what they
do. That's what you are looking to standardize. And so you're
helping people further downstream in the organization, "See, this

is what I should get before the sales people hand over this
information, this is what should be in place. In order for me now
to put this order into the system and translate it to production or
manufacturing or whoever it is that's going to then deliver on the
requirements.
Joe: Staying on this standard work thing a little bit, if I'm a Lean
company and I have standard work documents... let's say that
I'm going to be ISO-compliant. Should standard work documents
be subject to surveillance or the audit of ISO?

Lindsay: Well, if they wouldn't, wouldn't you then again be
trying to run duplicate systems? How productive is that? Again,
that's a huge drain, isn't it - having multiple standard work
documents? Some that meet the ISO requirements some meet
the requirements of the Lean Initiative. Some meet the
requirements of a customer. Some meet the requirements of
Sarbanes-Oxley. It makes sense, as an organization looks at the
way that these management systems. I always like to take ISO
out of the equation and just say to the organization, "We're
talking about your operating practices that naturally are impacted
by financial measures and metrics that are naturally impacted by
strategic objectives. Bring them in together. Do not make them
discrete. Make sure that these things interrelate. It just makes it
easier and more realistic to manage rather than having these
multiple, dueling or competing initiatives."
Joe: You're saying that it should be just part of the practice of
the company? If they establish best practices, they're more likely
ISO compliant to begin with then?
Lindsay: I've never found an organization that did not meet the
requirements in some shape or form. They may not meet them to
the degree and usually they're the first ones to admit. "There are
certain parts of our business that we are a little more informal.
Those are the parts of the business where we are more...it's more

thought out, it's more documented, it's more well understood and
it's more consistent." Usually, once you've done an evaluation of
the organization, you can actually substantiate and say that. In
these other areas you really are feeling some pain." People ask
and this missing thing is information that has been
miscommunication, it's been missing. Product therefore has been
produced and delivered to the customer that doesn't meet
requirements. Which then costs time and energy and having it
returned. Evaluating it, what are we going to do to avoid it from
happening again? Improving the credibility with the customer, all
of those things, ultimately, we want to avoid happening in the
first place.
Joe: Can a Lean company work hand in hand with ISO?
Lindsay: Absolutely. I've seen it time and time again. The big
question is which would happen first? Maybe you've got an
opinion on that.
Joe: I don't know that I have an opinion of it. When I think of a
Lean Initiative and we go in, we try to break down the silos a
little bit. But first of all, what we try to do is create the value
streams and improve a general process. But improving it, Ono
would say, "No standard, no improvement." You've got to have a
standard to begin with.
Lindsay: Exactly.
Joe: So if you're sitting there looking at a standard and you
draw up that standard, you're going to find deficiencies within
your organization right away. Then you start the improvement
process. I guess, where I've always looked at ISO before is the
fact that, to me, it was a checklist. To me, it was something that
I needed to be compliant about. Was it a good checklist? Yes, it
was an excellent checklist. There were certain areas that I could
take a look at ISO and look at how we did shipping, maybe. Or


look at how we are handling complaints. These would be my
improvement initiatives, where I failed in the ISO standard. I
would think that that would be a good way to be able to achieve
ISO is through using the tools of the Lean or the journey.
Lindsay: Absolutely. I've seen the two tools work phenomenally
well together. Again ISO is really... and this gets back to the
question that you had asked about, "Can companies go wrong?" I
think lots of companies go wrong, just by underestimating what is
the initiative because, essentially, it's looking at every part of the
business. How can you make changes to every part of your
business in a matter of weeks without it having a huge impact?
You want to make sure you're doing it correctly. ISO is a
wonderful tool to say, "OK. Here is the framework. We are now
going to look... we're going to follow our process through."
From marketing through closing through sales to the contract
being generated and the order being received, the material being
purchased. Any design that might need to take place;
manufacturing, shipping, delivery, invoicing. Then circling back to
get feedback from the customer. Continual improvement,
corrective action and then all of the support processes that take
place.
That is where Lean is phenomenal. Then come in and say, "We've
been evaluating ourselves against this framework, we've come up
with a number of areas where we are lacking, where we do need
to standardize, but where there are opportunities for
improvement."

That gives Lean the platform to go in and say, "OK. Let's look at
shipping. Let's look at a specific part of our design process. Let's
look at a specific part of our marketing process. Look to see how
can we make this more streamlined? How can we improve this?
How can we add value here?" ISO makes it... again, offers the
tools to then say, "OK. So now we've really changed this process.

We've really improved it. What is the best way of communicating
this to our people, so that they understand how it's changed,
what they need to do?"
By looking cross-functionally, because obviously every process
typically involves multiple functions, we understand the hand-offs
and the involvement from each group of people. The best way to
do that is to document it. It kind of gets back to that fear that
many organizations have that, "ISO is all about documenting."
It's the nature of the business. It's the nature of the beast. But
why is that a bad thing? Why is it a bad thing to have, in flow
chart form, or to have pictures and photographs, work
instructions, as they are necessary, how something should be
performed? To provide the clarity and the standardization and the
continuity and the consistency that people want and need.
Joe: Kind of sets the bar, doesn't it, of what you need to do?
Lindsay: It really does set the bar. How many times... maybe
you've seen this too, as you've gone into organizations. You find
somebody who is in the sales department or they're new in the
shipping department or the engineering or R&D functions. And
what are they doing? They're essentially creating their own work
instructions. They're creating their own procedures, because it's
what they need to understand, as a new person, how they
perform something. So any organization that shies away from the
need to document, the need to have things in black and white, on
paper or electronically... but the fact is that they are there, for
people to understand. I never understand that fear and it's so
prevalent.
Joe: You also mentioned which kind of intrigued me of applying
ISO to sales and marketing. How is that applied there?
Lindsay: Again, it is the same thing which I always call the new
standard. When I say the new standard I'm talking about the

standard, the revision of the year 2000. There was a revision,
actually, in 2008. But you could have blinked and missed the
changes. When I say the new standard... The year 2000, the
changes, the revision was so notable. Because it was such a shift
in thinking and it was asking organizations to look at processes,
instead of being departmentally focused, looking at the process
focus. What is that input that then says, "We need to go into the
transformation activity?" So at the end, we are then out-putting
or producing an unfinished product, a material, data, whatever it
is to then pass on to the next process. That, again, triggers it to
take place.
One of the great things about the new standard was that it was
really looking and teaching organizations to think about it in four
stages. That what do we plan to do? Then the execution. We've
now executed on our plan. We want to check. So what kind of
verification activity has taken place?
To make sure what we planned to do is indeed what we actually
executed on. And then, when we find that there is a mismatch,
what do we do to close the loop, to correct, analyze? So this is
very interesting, sorry for the long answer, when you think about
sales and marketing. You can absolutely apply that same plan,
do, check, act methodology. How many times are we saying,
"You are our customer, we want to understand what your
requirements are?" We then produce the statements of work that
confirms it back to them.
Maybe it's an estimate, maybe it's a proposal depending on the
nature of the company's business. Than saying, "How well have
we understood this?" How many of these opportunities are we
actually winning? How easy is it then for the group of people that
plan and produce whatever it is that we do, the product or
service, to take these requirements and accurately deliver?


Then go back to the customer at the end and say, "OK. Now
judge us, based on our complete cycle. Based on what we said
we would do in marketing, what we sold in the sales process and
then what we delivered to you in the manufacturing or the
delivery process? How well did we do? How well did we set the
expectations and how well did we deliver on them?"
Again, if you go into many organizations, there's this rivalry
between operations and sales. Sales is always selling something
that we know we can't deliver. And then sales says, "We're the
voice of the customer. Delivery never understands. We'd have no
business if it was up to them." That helps to start to close the
gap. Again, it's remarkable, some of those changes. Tell me you'll
find for me one business owner or leader of an organization that
isn't concerned about sales, doesn’t want to grow business. So
it's within their interest to tie all of this together.

Joe: You're saying that there should be a standard in your sales
or marketing that you should be following. Sales and marketing
must be utilizing those improvement methods out there to be
able to use. And ISO may be leading in that field.
Lindsay: Absolutely. Is sales and marketing not cyclical just like
everything else? Does it not have a trigger? Does it not have set
activities that need to take place, with a distinct deliverable? The
answer is, absolutely. It's just like any other process. We want to
help the people who are contributing, who are primary users of
that process, or contributors to that process, to understand.
These are the tools that are available to you. This is the
expectation of what you will be doing for this organization. This is
the expectation of what your deliverables will be. To set up every
process that leads from here successfully. You could look at it and
say, "Marketing is the first process. Sales is the second one."
Then from there, you've got the order receiving and the all the
way through manufacturing, shipping, delivery. Why wouldn't you
want to look at, essentially, the foundations of the organization?

And say, "How connected are we? Or how confident are we? How
strong these are?" Before, we start to make changes to other
subsequent processes.
Joe: I think that's very true but I think people in the sales and
marketing have stayed away from most quality initiatives. I
think...
Lindsay: They have, they have. You know what they say, they
say they love it; they want it as long as it doesn't affect them.
You can see it time and time again. Why do they love it and why
do they want it? They love it and want it because it's something
else they can sell to the customer, right. "Wow, look at this, we're
ISO. Wow, look at this, we're Lean or Six Sigma, we're this, we're
that. I don't personally have to do anything. It doesn't affect me
personally as a salesperson, but look what my organization does."
So it's always interesting when you say "Oh no, you too will be
impacted by this." Eventually they start to see "Yes, it's great."
When does anyone complain when they have more tools in their
toolkit? Ever?
Joe: No, I don't think so. I think the biggest complaint probably
is when and how to use the tools.
Joe: It seems like is such a basic process and I'll say checklist
driven, which may be a bad interpretation of it. But every ISO
book I ever opened up eventually got to a checklist.
Lindsay: Well, you know, and I love to where this is leading to
because it's exactly right. How many organizations... they now
serve multiple industries. So they may serve a very informal
entrepreneurial business. They may serve a very regulated
medical or pharmaceutical industry. So what does that mean to
them? Does that mean that every, you know, let's take sales,
since we've been talking about sales. Does that mean that the
sales person has to look and say "Every opportunity has to be


documented and we have to respond to it with the same
complexity that we would do if it was a medical opportunity?"

Absolutely not, the name of the game is building in that flexibility.
Not every customer wants to pay for a Cadillac. But the customer
that does and values that, then obviously it presents a higher
degree of risk, financial risk, quality risk.
So it makes sense that that's where the complexity of the process
really kicks in. We challenge companies all the time to say "OK,
let's build it." As long as everybody understands the criteria then
that gives them the flexibility to respond to the high risk, the
medium risk and the low risk contracts, customers, opportunities.
Joe: One of the things that happen in ISO that's always
confusing to me is that there are so many designations behind
ISO, ISO 9000, ISO 2000, ISO this and that. And it's confusing.
Is it really all that confusing?
Lindsay: I think they could have made it easier. I certainly don't
think that they've made it as easy as they could have done. I
mean what it boils down to is that back in the old version, 1997
version, 1994, sorry, version, you had ISO 9001, ISO 9002, and
ISO 9003. Essentially ISO 9001 was for organizations that
designed as well as manufactured or produced their product or
service, whereas 9002 was for organizations that had no design
responsibility. ISO 9003 was for organizations that only had
inspection. So a lab would be a perfect example of that.
The 2000 version came around and they decided do we really
need to make it this complicated? Let's just have one standard
and then organizations can exclude the disciplines that they don't
have. If they're not design responsible, they'll be ISO 9001
registered and they will just exclude that and say "We're not
design responsible. So we don't design, we don't expect to see it.
We don't even have a design group."


Again, if you were just a lab, then you would exclude the product
realization process because you're not producing a product or a
service. So they tried to make it a little more straightforward
there.
I think where people still tend to get a little confused is that it's
still ISO 9000 and 9004 and 9001 and they are essentially just
the guidance documents for helping companies interpret them.
But ISO 9001 is the only standard that an organization can get
registered to. And I'm not talking about the industry specific
standards.
I'm talking about, you know, you've got things like ISO 13485,
which is specifically for medical companies. So essentially it takes
ISO 9001 and has some modifications that are specific to what
the medical community would like to see.
Then AS 9100 is kind of the same thing but for aerospace but
essentially what they are doing is they're taking that one
standard, ISO 9001 is essentially the foundation for these
industry specific requirements. I'm sure I've made that very clear
now, right?
Joe: The other thing that you talked about and I thought was
really unique in a question you sent me was a centralized or
decentralized system ownership. Can you explain the difference
to me there and touch upon that?
Lindsay: The standard requires that an organization have a
nominated management representative. What that means is that
there is someone in the organization who is responsible
essentially for coordinating this ISO 9000 initiative. And that they
are responsible for reporting on the quality management system,
reporting back to management and they have management's
authority. Then typically this is the person who would deal with
the third party with the registration audits and that type of thing.


But what you see very often is that as an organization is thinking
about implementing a formalized quality management system like
ISO, they say "Who will do this for us? Who are we going to pick?
How are we going to approach this?"
So they will; nominate this individual, call them their ISO 9000
management representative and then say "OK, this is your baby.
You now need to make sure that you get us compliant so that we
will pass a registration audit." This person says "OK, what does
that mean?" "Well, you know, we need to document what we do
so you'll need to do that. So you need to get with everybody and
write all our procedures and our work instructions."
This person says "Well how much time is this going to take? You
know I'm the quality manager" or I don't know, "I'm the project
manager," or whatever I might be. I might be engineering
manager. Who knows what my function is? But how much time
do I have to do this? "Well how much time do you think it will
take?" "Well this sounds like a full time job."

"OK, well maybe we can get you some help" or maybe we just
expect you to do it. But the fact is that now this person is
dedicated to this initiative. They become kind of like a centralized
function. The downside of that is it lacks ownership. If you head
up sales and then you have got someone who heads up
engineering and you have somebody who heads up
manufacturing, shipping, R and D, purchasing. You've nothing to
lose.
Somebody else is coming in and documenting the processes and
is taking responsibility for this initiative. Why would you ever tell
this person when something has changed? You know, maybe not
maliciously, but you forget in the heat of battle. There are lots
going on.


You're just not as diligent about telling this person "OK, we've
made a change here. We've changed routines. Maybe we have a
new system for generating purchase orders." Or maybe we've
changed our criteria for evaluating critical vendors and it never
filters back to this person who sometimes it can seem is back in
their ivory tower trying to manage all of this program.
What we tend to see is a more effective model is saying "OK,
yeah, you have to have a management representative but this
person is really only coordinating. So they're the person who will
pull data together to present to management at the time of a
management review." When it comes to actually documenting
processes, looking at processes to see how they could be
optimized, it is much better if that falls to the person who has the
greatest influence on that particular process, which tends to be
departmental leaders.

They are the ones who can then work with their peers to say "OK,
we have a design process. Let's get a representative from
purchasing in here. Let's get a representative from
manufacturing. But as head of engineering this is my process and
I'm going to take responsibility for making sure it reflects the way
we want to do things. I'm not going to push it off to this
management representative to write this on my behalf and never
feel truly bought-in to it." Does that make sense?
Joe: Yes, yes. That's a tough thing for any quality department,
of how you actually manage quality within the organization.
Lindsay: You know, to me it's not about passing or failing
because again it is a system that has been successfully
implemented. Getting actually registered or getting certified is a
formality. I mean you would expect too. Why wouldn't you? The
fact is if you've done it properly you've been committed to it,
everybody has been involved, you're truly living and breathing it,
you're really don't need a third party to come in and tell you that.

You know it yourselves. Have one individual where it rises or falls
totally on them just seems completely unrealistic versus saying
"Hey, you know, there's a group of 15 or 20 people who have
been integral in analyzing what we do, addressing it and
documenting our activities and implementing these
improvements.
For some reason we were to fail it wouldn't be down to one
individual. This is a group effort. We want these people to feel
this is how we influence our organization. This is how I
communicate to other people and the people that are involved in
my process, how it should be performed and make sure that the
buy-in is there." And make sure as new people join the
organization that they understand the process, too.
Joe: When we talk about implementing ISO, can I just go
download some manuals and go through my checklists and
implement it?
Lindsay: You can, absolutely. If you want a quality council and
you want to suddenly think "OK, who would be on our quality
council?" Basically have all of the terminology that has been
taken out of another organization put into these stock or standard
procedures and try and somehow manipulate them to reflect what
you do, be my guest. Many organizations, I think, try to do that.
Of course, the downside is no organization is the same as the
next and the way they... you know, who the customers are, the
processes, the sophistication of the processes, the sophistication
of the infrastructure that the organization has. All of that is
different and it influences that.
So by the time you try to manipulate something from another
organization, it probably would have been easier to have said
"Let's start afresh with our own organization." And not try and
take a quality manual from ABC Manufacture in Arkansas.


Joe: You think it's beneficial to have an ISO external consultant
to assist in your organization to start? Or hire one, let's say.

Lindsay: Well, I think it's like any major initiative. The fact is
that do you as an organization, you have to ask yourself, do we
have the know-how internally and do we have the resources
internally? Do we have the discipline internally? Do we have the
discipline to prioritize for the next 12 months to get this thing
done?" Then this is where an organization says, "Or, do we want
someone to come in?" Who's done this over and over again we
don't have that learning curve. We got someone who will come in
and tell us, explicitly, "OK, this is where you are. This is where
your opportunities are. These are the minimum requirements that
you have to meet. This is some of your low hanging fruit that you
could pull into the program as you go along. This is how long it's
going to take you.'"

These are the people I think, that we think, need to be brought
into the program. These are your departmental leads. These are
the other people that, during the course of an evaluation audit,
make themselves apparent as being the movers and shakers. The
people who will be great in contributing and driving this process.
Then it becomes a knowledge transfer, so at the end of the
process...when I say the process I mean the end of the ISO
initiative...what is the end? I suppose it's when the processes
have been documented, the improvements have been built-in to
this documented system and then they have been implemented
and then verified through internal audits. That people are actually
working to them. That's what I'm talking about as the end.
When the company has then sought that knowledge of saying,
"Yes, we're comfortable that we are now conforming with the
requirements and we can take the next step to get ready,
depending on what we want to do." But by that time, we know
that the company is self-sufficient. We've had this drip feed

change management and knowledge transfer. With these internal
organization teams who have been involved in documenting and
implementing.
Joe: Where is the future of ISO going? Is it alive and well? It
seems kind of old hat to me.
Lindsay: It's amazing me and I've been doing this for 20 years.
If you had told me 15 years ago or maybe even 10 years ago,
that companies will still call up and say, "We're thinking of
implement ISO, can you come and talk to us about it?" I would
have said, "By 2011, everybody will have heard about it. There
will be no on that will be asking that question." Yet, maybe not
every day, but multiple times a week, someone is making that
very call, asking that very question. Why? Either the company
didn't exist 10 years ago. It didn't have the kind of customers or
it wasn't producing the kind of products where customers would
start to talk to them about...
...Have more formal quality management systems, higher
expectations. More work they wanted to push in their direction.
So they never needed to know about it. Yes, it's alive and kicking.
I can see it continue to be. I can't say it going away. Because
what would it be replaced by?
You hear lots of rhetoric about it's going to go away and
something else is going to come on. But that's going to take such
a concerted effort, when you think about just, "Who's been
involved, how long it's taken to get it to this point. How many
organizations are registered to it?" Just the adoption, it would be
an unbelievable undertaking to dismantle that and replace it with
something else.

Joe: So you believe that, in the future, it's only going to really
grow. I see very little in the marketplace about ISO. It seems like
it's a thing that, once you grow up as a company, you do. Maybe


more manufactures than service. Which I think is a misnomer.
Because I think it's very prevalent in healthcare and very
prevalent in other service firms now. But I don't see it in the
marketplace as much as what I see the other quality
methodologies. Is it just an accepted fact that you become ISO
after a certain size?
Lindsay: You said it. The larger organizations... I don't think
there are many large organizations that aren't registered.
Somehow, we were completely unaware of these standards. It's
just come to our attention 20 plus years. There's none of those.
The Baxters of this world and the Fords and the GM and all the
rest have been there, done that. I think that fraternity is asking
themselves, "How do we get more out of it? We've used that as
the baseline. Now how do we optimize?" This is, of course, where
I believe the Six Sigma comes into play for the smaller
organizations. They haven't. So they're now growing and they're
starting to do business with these larger organizations. They need
to get that baseline. ISO is offering them that opportunity. As
they do grow and they become the mid and larger organizations,
they are then in that same position. Saying, "Now, how do we
optimize it?" I think that's why you see a lot more of that in
publications because that's where the demand is.
Even when you read the blogs of the VPs of quality of any of the
Fortune 1000, that's really the emphasis, how do we do better?
How do we raise the bar? What methodologies are out there for
us? We've got a quality management system. Now how do we use
it to bring some of these techniques and these techniques
optimize it?
Joe: So ISO is really a standard that's accepted within industry.
It's just as much a part of industry now and what they do in
business as it is something that I'm going to do a cultural change
or transformation to achieve. We're looking to improve it and we


use it as a baseline for best practices and things. But it's not
really anything new to us. It's a part of the way we do business.

Lindsay: Exactly. Unless there'd be a significant change, like the
'94 to the 2000, that would cause a flurry of publicity and papers
being presented. And drive all of this activity of, "OK. How do we
approach it? What are the good ways and the bad ways?" That
need for all of that information to be out there. The downside is
the most recent change was negligible. That's not because the
opportunities aren't there. I think they are absolutely. I think
there's probably quite a lot of fighting right now about what the
new revision should look like.
How are we going to put more improvements in there? Should we
be looking at a different model of assessment? So people don't
know when the auditors are coming in? And looking at the
different improvement models to try and put some kind of hybrid
together. But this vast machine that represents these technical
committees, it's hard to get them all in agreement. Because
they're obviously looking for input now, from every country that
has the bodies in place and the technical committees in place.
That's where they get all the suggestions for changes from. Then,
they are digested and evaluated for merit, made into a draft and
then ultimately into the new standard. I would like to hope that
next time there will be some more significance.
Joe: Where does MOCG play a role and where are they going in
the future? What's their direction?
Lindsay: We firmly support all of the standards. Support
ISO-9000, all its industry derivatives. We also support the
environmental standard, ISO-14000. As well as the health and
safety standard, 18001. So that certainly isn't going away. We'll
continue to consult and help clients. And offer the training that
they need, too. We work a lot with the small to mid-size


companies, who are still saying, "We don't know anything about
it. Come help us understand the requirements. Decide whether
we want to get registered, use them as a framework. We're
getting to that stage now where the owner or the leader of the
organization cannot get his or her arms around everything."
They need to be able to start to let go and they need to be able
to have defined ways of doing it. So that they have the
confidence that the quality will be there and this body of
knowledge is never going to walk out the door because they
depend on one person and one department. So that need will
continue and we will continue to service that need. If new
opportunities present themselves, certainly we'll be developing
those.
Joe: Where would you send someone to learn about ISO, as a
new initiative?
Lindsay: There are still organizations out there where it's a sell.
It's a hard sell. Maybe it's the quality manager that says, "We
need to do it. I know a little bit. I know enough to be dangerous.
But I want to sell internally." I would say that one person should
go out and get themselves in an ISO-9000 public course. Then
they can have two days understanding the requirements and how
they would apply those requirements in their own environment.
Now, when that person is then successful, they go back. They
start to talk to the owner of the organization and say, "This is
something that I think we should do and these are the
opportunities. Someone from sales has already talked to me
about a couple of customers that have been murmuring about
wanting us to do this. How about I bring someone in and they can
talk to the management group about it?"
Then this is where we would probably come in and do a
presentation to the entire management team or some general
awareness training. So they can understand, what is it and what

is it not? As we've talked about over the last few minutes, there
are a lot of misnomers out there and lots of things that need to
be clarified to take the fear away.
And again, help an organization decide, "What do we have the
appetite for here? Do we have the appetite for a deep initiative
that's going to be far-reaching, that's going to have lasting
improvements? Or do we have the appetite here to just try, as
cheaply ad as quickly as possible, to get that certificate on the
wall by any means possible?" That means getting an ISO program
that's got a canned quality manual and a canned procedure. Then
we'll do that. The organization has to ask themselves, "What is it
that we want out of this?"
Again, the owner of the company has to say, "It's interesting. The
quality manager's saying we should do ISO. I've got the VP of
Operations saying we should do a Lean Initiative. I wonder if we
can bring all of these things together." That's where we'd say,
"Absolutely. You would be crazy not to, if you keep those two
initiatives separate. Then you're not capitalizing on all of these
opportunities and using a single program to pull them all
together."
Joe: You believe that ISO has to be tied to business metrics to
make it sustainable and to make it workable?
Lindsay: How else will you know how valuable it has been? How
will you be able to judge it, as an organization? And say, "Wow. It
was a resource strain. It took us a lot of time and it was quite
painful." But how will you know where you were before, in order
to say 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, five years later, how
have we changed? How have we grown? How have we improved?
What was its value, long term? That can only be done by building
in the metrics, so you can see the before and after.



Joseph T. Dager
Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
Ph: 260-438-0411 Fax: 260-818-2022
Email: jtdager@business901.com
Web/Blog: http://www.business901.com
Twitter: @business901

What others say: In the past 20 years, Joe and I have collaborated on
many difficult issues. Joe's ability to combine his expertise with "out of the
box" thinking is unsurpassed. He has always delivered quickly, cost
effectively and with ingenuity. A brilliant mind that is always a pleasure to
work with." James R.

Joe Dager is President of Business901, a progressive company providing
direction in areas such as Lean Marketing, Product Marketing, Product
Launches and Re-Launches. As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt,
Business901 provides and implements marketing, project and performance
planning methodologies in small businesses. The simplicity of a single
flexible model will create clarity for your staff and as a result better
execution. My goal is to allow you spend your time on the need versus the
plan.

An example of how we may work: Business901 could start with a
consulting style utilizing an individual from your organization or a virtual
assistance that is well versed in our principles. We have capabilities to
plug virtually any marketing function into your process immediately. As
proficiencies develop, Business901 moves into a coach’s role supporting the
process as needed. The goal of implementing a system is that the processes
will become a habit and not an event.

Business901 Podcast Opportunity Expert Status


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