Cooperation, consulting and Fads LO7460

Barry Mallis (bmallis@smtp.markem.com)
16 May 1996 09:13:45 -0400

Reply to: RE>Cooperation, consulting and Fads LO7448

I like Jesse's question about ISO making liars out of employees.

My experience contains these several points of reference:

1) A corrective action system should be comprehensive enough to include
observations of nonconformance to standard generated by customers,
employees and internal auditors (employees performing discrete auditor
functions).

2) ISO systems can be overloaded with CAR's (corrective action requests)
if management wants to track "everything" that's not conforming. This
leads to ambivalence in use of the CA system; employees in some instances
may balk at writing observations about nonconformances; in other cases,
they are loathe to get the reports which demand immediate action
(containment) where necessary, root cause analysis, action aplnning and
implementation to ensure the problem does not recur.

3) Through all the slippage which people inevitably bring to the
implementation of the 20 elements of the 9001 standard, one thing remains
constant: if customers are dissatisfied, the system will pick it up one
way or another! Honest and systems-aware management will do their best to
make the system work. The cyclical nature of the extent of employee
buy-in to, and maintenance of, ISO is a topic for another discussion.

(I will be off the list for the next week, back after that. For this
period messages can be sent directly to my email address below.)

Best regards,

-- 
Barry Mallis
bmallis@markem.com
TQ Resource Manager and Internal Auditor Trainer
MARKEM Corporation
Keene, NH U.S.A.

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>