ISO 9001

[Red Wood]

A simple question to other SME's.

Can you share the cost and length of time to implement 9001 as a small business and whether it had any meaningful benefit on winning new customers?

 

[fisicx]

Got involved in this while I was doing some contract work. Took months and months, ate up resources and achieved very little. New customers didn’t care.

 

[Mark T Jones]

I did it about 10 years ago, when we were dealing with Public Sector. (Education)

They like that sort of crap - as do some larger businesses.

The consultancy itself was kind of interesting, and did help our processes. It cost a bit more than standard consultancy, but wasn't outrageous.

Dealing was schools was a nightmare, so we dropped the idea and lapsed the ISO.

Overall it was sufficiently enlightening to be worthwhile, but not a meaningful boost to business

 

[WaveJumper]

Same here did it years ago for the investors to tick another box, ok if you have all your systems & ducks in a row, it's time consuming and for the life of me other than ticking those investor box's can't think what other benefit we got. However depending on the circles you are trading in they may require this along with other accreditations

 

[Chris Ashdown]

Great for Manufacturing and service industry for dealing with large companies, otherwise as others have stated little if any benefit

 

[fisicx]

When I did a quality managers course years ago the whole thing was summarised as:

“write down what you do then do what you have written down”.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

I was a Hydrographic surveyor when it ISO 9000 first came out, One company I worked for had many pages of specs on how to set up a theodolite, another company just stated that the theodolite was to be used by trained surveyors only and so on it went hundreds of wasted pages against thoughtful plans. I guess the experts made tons of money with the extra paperwork

 

[DontAsk]

Total waste of time and money for SMEs

 

[DaliaSpring]

We started this a few years ago. I think we paid just over 2k for the initial set up then 1k for the annual audits. We had to do it as a charity, it was a real pain in a lot of areas but it did force us to make sure policies were reviewed/updated regularly.

 

[MOIC]

If you're working with blue chip companies and their orders are of a high value, then it's (probably) worth doing. If your working with other SME's, I wouldn't bother.

 

[Deleted member 335660]

A simple question to other SME's.

Can you share the cost and length of time to implement 9001 as a small business and whether it had any meaningful benefit on winning new customers?

I’m not sure what you mean about sharing the cost. You will have to pay your own certification costs but sharing a consultant or training costs may be possible.

ISO 9001 is all about defining processes, so as a small company it may be quite simple. On the first run we went too far over the top and provided too much detail.

As for customers value it depends on your industry. As mentioned elsewhere, Governments and large business often insist on it. Ordinary consumers may well prefer it if fir things like building and construction of their house. I doubt anyone would be bothered if it was clothing or jewelry.

 

[DaliaSpring]

I’m not sure what you mean about sharing the cost.

I took this to mean share information on what it has cost other organisations.

 

[fisicx]

Depends on the business. The one I worked with spent about 50k. Their biggest problem was getting the workforce to comply.

 

[Deleted member 335660]

I took this to mean share information on what it has cost other organisations.

Oh okay. Sorry we did it a long time ago so cannot help you there.

 

[The Byre]

OK, here's the skinny - I did the entire documentation work for a large US international in both English and German. It cost them about $80k back in the 90s and they had to do it because their largest customer made it a requirement. We did this mammoth task together with engineers from TÜV Rheinland.

I came to the same conclusion as @fisicx, namely -

Took months and months, ate up resources and achieved very little. New customers didn’t care.

But if someone has that kind of money lying around and wants to spend it, I and the TÜV Rheinland will both be happy to oblige them!

 

[fisicx]

In the reams of documents we had to produce were a set of safety data sheets. One of the was for carbon paper. Another was for the coffee filters in the staff room.

Pointless box ticking.

 

[Red Wood]

Thanks all for the great responses.

My sentiment has been confirmed.

In almost 10 years and after supplying to many large multi- nationals, we have never been asked for it. Even though we have been involved in flagship construction projects that if named, most of you would recognise.

We've just come up against it now with a large O&G company, if we could get all in for a couple grand a year, probably would be worth to, but anything more we've survived this long, I'd likely give it a miss.

We are loosely in the import/distribution business, so I imagine there would be a hell of a lot of box ticking to be done in this sector.