Quality management: Audit results in comparison
What are companies struggling with in quality management today? What are the most common failures and causes? For these insights, the international certification company DNV analyzed the audit data of its customers worldwide.
DNV, a global independent certification, safety and risk management provider operating in more than 100 countries, has analyzed audit results worldwide. The analysis found that the greatest challenges in implementing the requirements of the ISO 9001 quality management standard are evident in Chapter 7, "Support," and Chapter 8, "Operations." Thus, about 56 percent of the audited organizations have a finding regarding chapters 7 and 8. 20 percent of them are deviations.
Chapter 7 Support
In Chapter 7, it is primarily the area of resources that poses challenges for companies. 32 percent of companies have findings in the implementation of Chapter 7.1 Resources. The findings relate primarily to the resources for monitoring and measurement (Chapter 7.1.5) to demonstrate the conformity of products and services with specified requirements, and to the infrastructure (Chapter 7.1.3) required to carry out the organization's processes. In addition, there are also opportunities for improvement in the areas of competence and documented information.
Chapter 8 Operation
More than every second company has at least one finding related to the implementation of the requirements in Chapter 8, which is the core of ISO 9001. Most of the findings requiring improvement relate to the requirements of Chapter 8.4 on the control of externally supplied processes (24 percent) and Chapter 8.5 on production and service provision (25 percent).
"The analysis clearly shows which areas of the standard cause difficulties in implementation," explains Dirk Vallbracht, Manager of Training at DNV Business Assurance in Germany. "The fact that most of the findings are found in Chapter 8 is unsurprising in that this chapter is the main focus of ISO 9001. It thus contains significantly more requirements than other chapters." The findings and deviations per chapter are presented in the results report. This gives users an indication of the challenges most other companies are struggling with.
Audit results under the magnifying glass
The analysis is the start of a mini-series for which DNV initially evaluated all audits from the year 2021 in the area of the ISO 9001 quality management standard. This was based on 100,000 audit findings from 25,000 customers worldwide. All data came from DNV's Lumina™ tool, a digital service for all DNV customers to compare audit data. "Trainings from DNV in Germany also incorporate the analyses of Lumina's audit findings by identifying problem areas during implementation and then prioritizing them in the training itself. In this way, we enable training participants to achieve the best possible learning success," says Vallbracht.
Source: www.dnv.de
