[Readings] ISO 9000 and the very small firm

After reading this weeks (Week 7) readings one paper raised a lot of questions in my mind, so rather then give a synopsis of the reading I will outline some questions and comments I have raised in relation to the reading.

'ISO9000 and the very small firm' by E.M. Wareham (1994)

While researching ISO9000, I came across this very good video on YouTube, it also highlights some themes that were mentioned in the paper. 

ISO9000 is an international standard quality management system, from my analysis of the case, two factors seem to be affecting the use of ISO9000 for the self proclaimed 'one man band' company, Vinculum Services. 

1. Cost: ISO9000 was expensive to install and the implementation has not led to cost efficiency.It also cost the 'one' employee time to implement the project "the time was found working more hours per week". As the employee describes their was "no return on the effort put in".
2. Administration/Paperwork: Vinculum brought in a consultant to help implement ISO9000, the consultant had only implemented ISO9000 with large organisations,. (When I first read this I thought this was Vinculum mistake, but I soon realised that ISO9000 is normally implemented in large organisation, so finding a consultant who had experience implementing ISO9000 for a small company must have been impossible.) This meant the consultant expected the 'one man band' to do as much paperwork as a large organisation, this of course drowned the employee in paperwork. 

Not having any experience working with ISO9000 I found it hard to understand the advantages of the system and other disadvantages, not covered in this paper. Fortunately my father had worked with ISO9000. As a background, my father was an electrical estimator for a large engineering organisation. I have surmised his main three points below.  

1. Advantage: ISO9000 allowed for assimilation of information between departments. So when he had to send files to another department, he knew that the recipient of the file would be able to navigate the files as ISO9000 standardize the filing system among departments.
2. Disadvantage: ISO9000 required total compliance and non-compliance would raise a 'red flag'. This meant that unusual circumstance caused them to be non-compliant. Unusual issues included, not being able to find the price of a product, meaning they had to 'guess' the price. This of course meant they were non-compliant. A more common occurrence was that they had a fixed price for materials they used in every job, however ISO9000 required them to 'go out and find prices', this created extra and needless paperwork. 
3. Suggestion: Similar to the recommendation in Wareham paper, he suggests that companies should identify their necessary procedures otherwise, they will waste time on excess paperwork, which is time and cost consuming.  

Learning: What I learnt from Wareham paper and talking to my father is; what ISO9000 cost in terms of money and labour it made up for in customer satisfaction as a result of being ISO9000 compliant. Other advantages for a large organisation would be the standardisation between departments.

Suggestions: ISO9000 needs to reduce the paperwork for non-necessary/rare procedures, this is ultimately the responsibility of the organisation as they should know what procedures are critical. As Wareham states this would make ISO9000 more accessible to smaller companies. 

My other suggestion is that ISO9000 should be more flexible for rare occurrences, I realise the obvious argument to this suggestion is that it defeats the purpose of standardisation. 

(Image Credit: Quickmeme.com)

Finally, overall this paper highlights that ISO9000 is viable option for small firms, which was the aim of the paper.