CHALLENGES IN GETTING ISO CERTIFICATION

As commitment to provide quality, many business organisation put much effort to pursue with ISO certification. However, many camponies facing problems in applying ISO system in the company and these had created challenges in progressing to certify.

• Budget - Common constraint facing by one organisation is budget. Either it is a limited budget, unwillingness to spend on ISO matters or even consider a big problem for a small business organisation.  Realizing that they required to be certified by have limitation in spending much money on it. High cost of consultancy fees including consultant's travelling expenses that normally include in the costing will be the burden to the orgsanisation.

• Consultant - Many companies hire and rely on external consultant with less of involvement in setting up the ISO system. Unfortunately, they may discover that the consultant does not understand the organisation's business or process, resulting in a documented system that little or no merit to organisation. Although there are many excellent consultant out there, a company's limited financial resources may become a deciding factor between choosing a consultant who is cheap or consultant who is capable. This may result in problem in maintaining the ISO system after certification and cause wasting of money as product quality still cannot be consistently produce even the ISO system is already in place.

• Time - Distruptions of consultant's onsite visit to daily operation due to tight scheduling to match with consultant's own scehdule.

“I wanted to have ISO certification for my company, but I can’t afford consultant expensive fees”

“I am assigned to develop my company ISO system and I have team to do it, but would like some consulting help without the cost of an onsite consulting program”

“I do not understand what had my previous consultant did in setting up ISO system, I have problem in maintaining the system and problem answering to the auditor”

WHY ISO STANDARD MATTER ?

ISO certification is quality recognition of an organization’s product or service. Quality means fulfillment to the suppose specification and fulfillment to customer’s requirement or expectation.  In other word, quality is the customer’s perception of the value of the work output. In today’s increasingly global growth and expansion, customers expect to benefit from wider choice of good quality product and service. Standards are one vital tool to achieve this objective.

“Standards ensure desirable characteristics of products and services such as quality, environmental friendliness, safety, reliability, efficiency and interchangeability - and at an economical cost. When products and services meet our expectations, we tend to take this for granted and be unaware of the role of standards. However, when standards are absent, we soon notice. We soon care when products turn out to be of poor quality, do not fit, are incompatible with equipment that we already have, are unreliable or dangerous. When products, systems, machinery and devices work well and safely, it is often because they meet standards. And the organization responsible for many thousands of the standards which benefit the world is ISO” – www.iso.org