Setting the Standard

Using standards can offer a set of powerful business and marketing tools for organizations of all sizes. Standards can be used to fine-tune an organization’s performance and manage the risks they face while operating in more efficient and sustainable ways. Standards allow organizations to demonstrate the quality they offer to their customers and reassures customers or clients that they will receive a consistent product or service.

How Standards First Emerged
The quality of standards originated many years ago. The concept of quality as we think of it now, first emerged from the Industrial Revolution. Previously, goods had been made from start to finish by the same person or team of people, with handcrafting and tweaking the product to meet “quality criteria.” Later, mass production brought huge teams of people together to work on specific stages of production, so a single person would not necessarily complete a product from start to finish. In the late 19th century, the limitations of the methods being used in mass production at the time, as well as the subsequent varying quality of output were recognized. Quality departments were established to oversee the quality of production and to rectifying errors and the standardization of design and components were emphasized to ensure the production of a standard product. Quality, as a profession and the management process associated with the quality function, was introduced during the second-half of the 20th century and has evolved since then. Over this period, quality has achieved status as a recognized profession.

What is a Standard?
A standard is basically an agreed way of doing something. It could relate to making a product, managing a process, delivering a service or supplying materials. Standards can cover a large range of activities carried out by organizations and used by their customers. They provide companies and their leaders with the knowledge they need to know so they can adjust their organization to perform at its best, every day and at every level. Standards are designed to be implemented voluntarily; they are not mandatory. Organizations are not forced to follow a set of rules that make life difficult; standards offer ways to do your work better.

Nowadays, customers recognize that quality is a key element in products and services. Suppliers recognize that quality can be an important differentiator between their own offerings and those of competitors. In the past two decades, this quality gap has been significantly reduced between competitive products and services. This is partly due to the internationalization of trade and competition, as well to quality standards that many countries have raised in order to meet international standards and customer demands.

The Most Used Standard
The ISO 9000 series of standards are probably the best-known international standard guidelines for quality management. The ISO 9000 family of quality management systems standards is designed to help organizations ensure that they meet the needs of customers and other stakeholders, while meeting statutory and regulatory requirements related to a product. This standard deals with the fundamentals of quality management systems, including the eight management principles upon which the family of standards is based. An ISO 9001 quality management system will help organizations to continually monitor and manage quality across all operations. As the world’s most widely recognized quality management standard, it outlines ways to achieve, as well as benchmark, consistent performance and service. Over a million organizations worldwide are independently certified, making ISO 9001 one of the most widely used management tools in the world today.

Certified Companies
More than 70,000 companies across the world, from small and medium-sized businesses to 51% of the combined FTSE 100, Fortune 500 and Nikkei organizations, have adopted performance management products and services. Independent research shows that these companies significantly outperform others in terms of profit and return on investment. In Curaçao, there are several companies that are already ISO certified. Most of them have achieved the ISO 9001 standard, the standard for quality management systems. Since achieving an ISO certification is not mandatory, there are still a lot of local companies that are not aware of these standards or do not see the benefits yet.

The Benefits of Standards
Using standards can help organizations improve the quality of their services, manage projects so deadlines can be met and help them stay on budget. Standards can also strengthen the resilience of IT systems, certify products so they attract more customers, manage assets better, and build successful collaborative relationships with other organisations. They are powerful tools that can help drive innovation and increase productivity. Research has shown that organizations that use standards have more satisfied customers, work more efficiently, have better cost control and are able to implement new working practices faster and more effectively. Working with standards can help organizations to depend on every member of its staff to drive the performance of the business at all times. Once an organization has met the demands of the standard, it can become certified, making it stand out from the crowd.

Farouk is a certified ISO lead auditor and leads a team of ISO and IT auditors. The Risk Assurance Services Department is specialised in Information Security, Internal Controls, Governance, Compliance and Enterprise Risk Management.