ISO 9001 is the world’s most popular quality management system standard. Organizations benefit from ISO 9001 by improving their customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, defect reduction, productivity improvement. ISO 9001 prescribes a set of requirements which needs to be built into the Quality Management system of the organization. When complied with these requirements, the organization gets certified to ISO 9001. After understanding the significance and importance of ISO 9001, the first question that strikes every organization is that ‘How to get ISO Certification?’ Following are the typical steps that are part of an organization’s ISO 9001 certification journey.
Typically, organizations engage QMS consultants to take them through these phases. However, nowadays, there are off the shelf software packages available which come with pre-defined Quality Management System. Apart from the pre-defined QMS, these packages ensure that the organization smoothly sails through these stages which are mentioned above, hence leading to successful certification. In essence, the requirements i.e. clauses of ISO 9001 are built into the various modules of these packages. Hence, deployment of these packages ensures automatic compliance to ISO 9001. In short, these software packages provide a major leap to the organizations in their ISO 9001 certification journey.
Effivity is one such QMS software package which is being widely used across the globe. Effivity is a web based application which can be accessed from anywhere, anytime. The requirements of ISO 9001 are addressed through the following modules of Effivity
The organization’s users i.e. employees have different activities to be performed based on their roles in different modules, as listed above. The activities to be performed are built into these modules in a user friendly and easy to understand fashion. By using these modules, it is automatically ensured that the documentation and the records required for the ISO 9001 certification audit are created and maintained. All the activities/milestones in the ISO 9001 certification journey are automatically addressed by deploying the software in the organization. Gap Analysis, QMS definition is addressed as the software comes with a pre defined Quality Management System.
Training on QMS is addressed as the software is very intuitive and hands on and hence the users are able to understand the QMS by themselves. QMS deployment is the area where Effivity provides a major advantage. Effivity takes across the QMS to hundreds/thousands of users of the organization in no time and ensures that all users start deploying the QMS in their respective areas. The deployment can be done in no time irrespective of the number of locations and number of users. As the mandatory requirements of ISO 9001 certification audit namely Internal audit, Management review are built into Effivity , it is ensured that the organization sails the certification journey smoothly.