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Quality Management is Critical to a Company's Success
The 1950's were a turning point for Japanese industry which had been exhausted by WWII. At that very time 'a seed was sown' which over the years was to grow into the philosophy, generally accepted by the world's largest corporations and used as a criterion for evaluating the significance and adequacy of a company's performance on any continent, — the quality management philosophy. Russian companies currently operating on the international market, aim to incorporate global technologies into their business processes. The most successful ones pass external audits and receive official confirmation of the conformity of their quality management systems to the international standards affirmed by ISO 9001 certificates. Let us consider the example of the largest Russian software developer for the telecom market CBOSS Association, which obtained ISO 9001 certification for their quality management system (QMS) in 2004.
Olga Koloskova, Kompetentnost (Competence) magazine, #3, 2005
Experienced and competent managers in any manufacturing company strive to develop a unified system of relations, management and production within the company which allows its staff, regardless of ever-changing market conditions, to manufacture products complying with certain requirements and meeting the demands of customers.
The key lines of business development are high-tech production quality management and complex manufacturing processes management. Such a development concept ensures a high level of performance and enables the establishment of a quality management system, which in many respects conforms to the requirements of the ISO 9001:2000 standard. Yet when a company is actively expanding into foreign markets it is faced with the necessity for official recognition of its quality management system's actual compliance with international standards.
What problems then arise and how can a company solve them? Let us try to answer these questions taking into consideration the QMS certification experience of the two companies affiliated with CBOSS Association, CJSC 'CBOSS' (Moscow, Russia) and CBOSS Oy (Helsinki, Finland).
CBOSS Association had been preparing for the QMS certification from January to June 2004. The process culminated in July of the same year when both of the CBOSS Association companies, which manufacture the entire range of CBOSS products, passed the certification audit. In December 2004 they were awarded the ISO 9001:2000 certificate for their quality management system.
But what does obtaining ISO 9001:2000 certification for a QMS bring to a company and its customers?
First of all, receiving a certificate of compliance is another confirmation of the stability and quality of the services and solutions offered. Moreover, the scope of certification covers the process of production and not the products themselves. The obtained QMS certification affirms that these processes are formalized and performed in accordance with established regulations. Last but not least, the processes are checked by a disinterested party, i.e. external auditors.
Consequently certification of a company's QMS to the ISO 9001:2000 standard undoubtedly gives an essential competitive advantage, both on international and domestic markets. This fact alone is enough to initialize the process of certification.
The experience of obtaining ISO 9001:2000 certificates for QMS, accumulated by various companies since the standard and certification procedures came into force, is quite extensive. Therefore CBOSS specialists decided not to reinvent the wheel and to take the existing practice as a basis.
So they were to:
- carry out certification preparation;
- pass certification audit;
- keep the system running and continuously improve it.
Certification Preparation
During the preparatory stages for certification, CBOSS's management team made the decision not to employ the services of external consultants, as some of the company's specialists already had experience implementing a QMS. The CBOSS specialists carried out the internal evaluation of the QMS, detected its strengths and weaknesses and decided on ways of eliminating the latter.
The Association's management certainly knew that to pass the certification audit, they had to create the right organizational, resource, methodological and social/psychological conditions in the company. Work in this direction was done very thoroughly during the first stage for it was evident that omissions and errors made during the organizational phase could later lead to labor-intensive adjustments and modifications. Specialists in quality management worked out a plan as a basis for carrying out all the activities.
In March and April 2004 the internal audit was conducted in the company. The aim was to assess whether the QMS of CJSC 'CBOSS' and of CBOSS Oy was in accordance with the ISO 9001:2000 standard and, of no less importance, whether the companies followed the formal conditions required. During the audit the specialists got an idea of what needed to be done to finally make the QMS fully conform to the requirements of the standard.
The results of the internal audit revealed three tasks that CBOSS Association needed to accomplish first of all.
1. To compile a Quality Manual as such a document was not available in the company at the time the internal audit was conducted.
2. To implement a unified approach to the process of documentation management. CBOSS Association companies, which were preparing for QMS certification, lacked a standard approach to the management of documents. They applied adequate procedures but the existing documents had been drawn up according to different templates as part of the documents developed for one company were used within the other one, notwithstanding the application area restrictions.
3. To coordinate the activities of the quality management specialists of CJSC 'CBOSS' headquartered in Moscow and those of CBOSS Оу headquartered in Finland, as both companies were to undergo a unified certification audit.
While solving the above problems, the procedures required by the standard were described in the company documents. All the processes were set in accordance with the Deming Cycle. The fact that internal communications fully complied with the established requirements simplified the task considerably. All the required assessments had already been carried out and data for the analysis of employee performance had consistently been available to division heads. In addition the management had regularly analyzed the issues described in the requirements of the standard.
Having thus evaluated the scope and duration of work to be done, CBOSS specialists then proceeded to the selection of an external auditor.
Selection of Auditor
When selecting an auditor, CBOSS Association was guided by the following criteria:
- Whether a certification company is authoritative;
- Are its auditors competent and do they adhere to principles;
- Can auditors of the same certification company work at both CBOSS Association companies, CJSC 'CBOSS' in Moscow and CBOSS Оу in Helsinki.
After lengthy negotiations, studying each company's reputation and analyzing their capabilities, the audit company Bureau Veritas Quality International (BVQI) was selected as it is one of the world's largest certification companies and a member of the Independent International Certification Organization.
It was arranged to conduct the certification audit at the beginning of July in Moscow and at the end of July in Helsinki.
It only remained for all the internal issues related to preparation for certification to be settled, to pass the certification audit and to await the results. The work started to flow: documentation development, its coordination and confirmation, various consultations, etc. became a daily, albeit never routine, but interesting part of the work of CBOSS specialists.
«Frankly speaking, we thought all this would be very resource intensive but the clear structure of relations and the easily understandable procedure of business communications allowed us to significantly minimize possible costs», commented Eero Arkonkoski, Director, Production and Services at CBOSS Oy.
In June 2004 training on the issues concerning the upcoming QMS certification was arranged for division heads. The quality management sector staff participated directly in the organization and holding of the above training.
Certification Audit
In June 2004 the preparatory work was nearly completed. The certification audit of the CBOSS's CJSC quality management system was performed by BVQI specialists from June 30 to July 1, 2004, and of the quality management system of CBOSS Оу from July 20 to July 24, 2004. All the major divisions were thoroughly examined. The auditors assessed the conformity of the actual state of affairs to the very letter of the standard.
What did the employees learn from this complicated and responsible procedure?
Firstly, a clearer understanding of the necessity to pay careful attention to the great number of formalized requirements outlined in the standard. For instance, it contains the requirement for a company's management team to perform a QMS analysis. Such procedures are regularly carried out at CBOSS, which is stated in the internal Quality Manual. Yet the auditors noted that no timeframe or procedure for performing this analysis was documented anywhere. The actions were being performed but what was obvious to the employees proved to be unclear to the external auditor. At the same time they needed to clearly understand from the QMS documentation how the system operated and whether there could be a malfunction of the system if, for example, the employees who knew how to perform certain actions went on business trips or took vacation. In the course of the audit the CBOSS specialists realized there are not and cannot be any trifles in such matters and actions must be adequately described in the documentation.
Secondly, another lesson from the certification audit learnt by CBOSS specialists was the evident necessity to improve the culture for performing internal audits, mainly from the point of view of the formalization of audit result records required for further QMS analysis.
On the whole the results of the certification audit were quite encouraging, as only a few inconsistencies had been revealed in both of the companies affiliated with CBOSS Association. They were eliminated and the corresponding evidence was submitted before the specified 90 day deadline.
Finally on September 17 the chief auditor sent a certification audit report to the head office of BVQI recommending that a declaration be made that the quality management system at CJSC 'CBOSS' and at CBOSS Оу conforms to the requirements of the ISO 9001:2000 standard.
On October 7, 2004 the decision to award the certificate of compliance to CJSC 'CBOSS' and CBOSS Оу was made.
When commenting on the event CBOSS Association President A. Morozov emphasized, «Our company pays special attention to quality issues and we are happy the project was so well organized and proved a success. Now we are to implement the final stage, that is to keep the quality management system running and to continuously improve it».
