The ISO Registration Success Rate

For whatever reason, known only to the people that decide these things, I’ve been assigned to about 40 first-time ISO registration projects. The question comes up: How many of these people “succeed”.

This of course depends entirely on one’s definition of “success”.

I am actually working on an ISO deployment presentation that I may post at some point. But, in the meantime, here is a very meaningful graph on this topic:

This deserves a little explanation.

An organization that wants to go through the ISO registration process needs to go through a “Stage 1” and “Stage 2” audit. The Stage 1 is a screening situation. The auditor walks around in the place, and comes to a determination of whether the client has a system in place.

The required elements of this “system” are the management review, internal audit, objectives, corrective actions, document control, and risk analysis. The criteria for this differ slightly depending on which registrar the company is working with.

The “Stage 2” audit is an actual initial audit to determine the level of conformity to the standard. It is an audit of all of the systems and processes.

So, “success” at one level can mean that they made it through the Stage 2 process, and based on my limited sample, working with two different registrars, this happens about 90 percent of the time.

Stopping at or before Stage 1

In the 40 or so of the cases I have worked on, four did not make it through the Stage 1 process. In one of the four, this was a global company with a very good reputation for quality that determined that the re-establishment of their system of work instructions wasn’t worth the management effort. I actually have some respect for this, since not every company and in not every industry is the ISO registration a necessary tool. In the remaining cases, the company just thought better of it, partly because they thought it was going to be one thing, and it turned out to be another. The amount of management commitment and overhead activity was, in their view, not needed in their situations. I perceive this as a lack of education and understanding on the part of the management of what to expect.

Passing the Stage 2 but Abandoning it later

I have been around long enough to have observed some the outcomes of the long-term adoption of ISO registration. In about 13% of the cases, the company goes through the Stage 1 and Stage 2 processes, gets the ISO registration, and then drops it either the following year, or a couple of years later when it is time to renew.

It may seem pretty crazy to walk away from the significant investment of time and energy and money that it took to get registered in the first place.

Why would someone do this? In most of these cases, the original motivation was that a specific customer was requiring ISO registration as a condition of some contract or piece of business, and the client did not get the business for some other reason. In one of the cases, the driver for ISO registration was a person in management, and that person left the company. In one of the cases the client got into financial trouble and was forced to reduce overhead.

The Reluctant Adopters

In about half of the cases of ISO certification, the client adopts the system “reluctantly”. This means that the client does not get the full use of the system as a business tool. In about half of these cases, the client actually has pretty strong systems and processes, and needs to keep up the registration to maintain some piece of business. These clients maintain their systems and procedures, but do not use them as a daily way to run their business.

In the other half of the cases, the client does not have strong systems. They do the ISO registration because someone is forcing them to. Often, they buy a canned system from the internet, or adopt a quality system manual from some other outside source, and are not engaged with the processes. In this fraction of the cases, there is quite often an entrenched management that goes through the motions. In these cases, the ISO experience is fairly miserable. Their year is filled up with the endless cycle of “cramming” for their audit. These are also the places that have high turnover in the quality manager position. This quite often leads to major non-conformances, due to non-performance.

I actually feel sorry for them. These places are no picnic for the auditor either.

The Stellar 25%

The remainder? These are the people that are engaged in the ISO system and its underlying philosophies. They are using the system as a tool to drive change and improvement in their businesses. They’re quite often happy to see that by taking corrective actions to solve problems permanently, they can improve their efficiency and customer service. There are enough success stores of this type that the auditor takes pride in going into the place, knowing that they contributed positively to the company’s success.

I’ve said it before: The properly implemented ISO system pays for itself by a factor of about 10. The improperly implemented system makes your life miserable and makes you not want to go into the office.

How To Fix It?

I guess I as a person that likes people to succeed, I would like everyone to fall into the last group. But, I think it is equally fine to be in the very first group. These are the companies that embraced reality and thought better of it before they got into the system in the first place.

Maybe the way to fix it is to think better of it in the first place. I can and do provide the service of doing a gap analysis, and go through your systems and give you more information. That would help you go through some introspection, and quite possibly think better of it, which would be a good thing.

I would love to hear your comments on this topic.