Clause 10.1 Improvement (secrets explained)

Clause 10.1 continual improvement is the backbone of the ISO 9001:2015 (14001, 45001) standards. This clause of the standard requires that you select ‘opportunities for improvement’. Does that phrase sound familiar? It should be because you have already come across it at clauses 5.3(c), 9.3.2(f) and 9.3.3(a). The driving force behind management systems is continual improvement, and the high-level structure design of ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2015 and ISO 45001:2018 present many opportunities for identifying and discussing ways to improve. But “what exactly are we trying to improve?”, I hear you ask. The answer is quite simple, you are trying to improve your customer relations for both your internal and external customers.

Plan, Do, Check, Act

When you realise that the totality of your processes, procedures, tasks and communications etc. are all connected to the customer in some way, then improvements to any of them will result in a better customer experience. Modern management systems are built according to the Plan, Do, Check, Act concept of continual improvement. This concept can be mapped across the high-level-structure clauses as follows:

• Plan: clauses, 4, 5, 6, 7 where we make plans for the management system including performing a PESTLE and SWOT analysis, process requirements, process controls, management responsibilities, roles, responsibilities and authorities, plans for risk and opportunities, resource requirements, training, communication and document control.
  
  
• Do: clause 8 is the result of all your planning from the previous clauses put into action across all the activities of your business.
  
  
• Check: clause 9 is asking you to perform checks so that you can ascertain if all the effort from the planning phases has been implemented correctly, and is being effective.
  
  
• Act: clause 10 has inputs from clauses 4.1, 6.1, 9.2, 9.3 and 10.2 that help you to identify opportunities for improvement.
  
  

Think of the plan, do, check, act concept as being cyclic in nature. It’s a wheel that never stops turning like the cogs of a clock where each cog is connected to another cog so that the hands keep turning and delivering an accurate time. If you look at the graphic design on the front cover to ISO 9001:2015, it depicts the internal workings of a watch. I’m pretty certain that this is a reference to the way I’ve just described the internal relationships of the continual improvement process. Have you made a commitment to continual improvement within your quality policy?

Key Benefits Of Continuous Improvement

In today’s highly competitive business environment, it is essential that an organisation maintains high levels of performance. Your organisation should be quick to react to changes in both internal and external conditions and reduce risk and create new opportunities for improvement. ISO 9000:2015 provides a clear list of key benefits from continual improvement including:

• improved process performance, organizational capability and customer satisfaction;
• enhanced focus on root cause investigation and determination, followed by prevention and corrective actions;
• enhanced ability to anticipate and react to internal and external risks and opportunities;
• enhanced consideration of both incremental and breakthrough improvement;
• improved use of learning for improvement;
• improved staff competence
• enhanced drive for innovation. (Source ISO 9000:2015 )

Opportunities for improvement can come from many sources but the best mechanism for this are the process owners and from your customers in the form of feedback. The internal audit process, management review, and subsequent corrective actions are all mechanisms that are built into the management system requirements. However, they are all ‘reactive’ at dealing with and fixing problems after they have occurred. How fast you can conduct these processes and enact change might be the reason for losing contracts, customers or receiving fines from regulatory bodies.

Learn about continual improvement on one of our ISO 9001 training courses.

A Proactive Approach To improvement

Of course, a ‘proactive’ approach is the best course of action when considering continual improvement. If you can implement a process by which your process owners can communicate ideas for improvement, then this can have nothing but benefits to the management system and ultimately, customer relations. This can be achieved by using:

• Suggestion boxes
• Email communication
• Online discussion forums
• Face-to-face interviews
• Brainstorming sessions
• Prize incentives
• Critical analysis techniques include lean six sigma, kaizen and 5s etc.

I would suggest using a combination of all of the above and seeing what works best. If the culture of your organisation encourages and rewards process owners for suggesting opportunities for improvement, then my suggestions will not be new to you. If this type of culture does not currently exist, then I would suggest nurturing it. If your culture is one where all staff are aware that everything they do will ultimately affect the customer in some way, then the continual ‘process improvement’ concept will not be a tough pill to swallow. This type of culture can only be achieved through effective leadership, education, training and communication.

A Culture For Continual Improvement

I must emphasise that this is a cultural attitude and must be driven by leadership at the highest levels. Opportunities for improvement must not operate from within a vacuum, they must be a common way of thinking and an accepted, beneficial business approach. It’s the concept of continually trying to be the very best of what you do. There isn’t a single organisation anywhere that gets it right every time, but the best ones out there will ‘always’ strive to learn by their mistakes and update their management systems accordingly.

From a high-level perspective, a conceptual approach to continual improvement consists of the following components at a minimum:

• Top management commitment
• Effective customer communications
• Product and service design
• Product and service delivery
• A management system incorporating PDCA
• Education, communication and training

If you examine that list you will see that it effectively describes, in short-hand, most modern management systems. If you have fully understood everything that you have read so far, it should be quite easy for you to map all the clauses of the standard against the items on the list. A practical level, to achieve this you could:

• Recognise and reward improvement
• Design global improvement objectives
• Audit and review improvement objectives and processes
• Implement education and training of improvement objectives
• Develop a ‘continual improvement’ culture

The general statement of clause 10.1 requires an organisation to determine and select opportunities for improvement. You are also required to implement the actions needed to improve customers’ requirements and enhance customer satisfaction. Those few sentences effectively describe the intended outcomes of the ISO 9001:2015 management system. The clause requirements then become a little more specific in that you ‘shall’:

(a) Improve to meet customer requirements and their future needs and expectations; how do you know what those future needs and expectations might be? Are you supposed to develop psychic skills that enable you to look into the future? Well, you could always communicate with your customers and ask them directly. You could also study market trends and look into industry predictions for trends in products and services. I was recently listening to radio:4 (UK) where an industry expert on the trend of home food deliveries was forecasting the future of food deliveries such as those offered by all the major supermarkets etc. I have to say that if the expert is correct, the future of how we shop is going to change quite radically.

(b) Preventing undesired effects; you should make plans to prevent this from happening mainly by performing your PESTLE and SWOT analysis and with the plans to identify and reduce risk at clause 6.1. Of course, even the best of plans can fail from time to time. This is largely caused by a lack of communication between departments and a lack of education and training in process requirements. Regular reviews of objectives, swift corrective actions, effective communications and appropriate training are the keys for preventing undesired effects.

(c) Management system improvements and effectiveness; this is the culmination of everything that we have discussed so far, not only in this article but in all of the other articles beginning at clause 4.1. The results of your internal audit reports, the data produced from your monitoring, measuring and evaluation activities at clause 9 are all fed into your management review process and discussed in terms of corrective actions and continual improvement.

There is no requirement for documented information to be maintained or retained for clause 10.1.

ISO 14001:2015

The requirements remain conceptually the same excluding the word ‘customer’.

ISO 45001:2018

The requirements remain conceptually the same excluding the word ‘customer’.

For auditors:

• Check the requirements for clauses 5.3(c), 9.3.2(f) and 9.3.3(a). have been addressed.
• Check for a line of sight between the internal audit process, management review and the corrective actions process.
• Check the requirements for clause 9.1.2 have been addressed (ISO 9001:2015 only)
• Check for objectives that contribute towards continual improvement.
• Investigate training and communication with regard to continual improvements.
• Investigate management commitment to continual improvement.

Other questions that I will answer in further articles:

• What is an ISO opportunity for improvement?
• How do I get continual improvement?
• How can I improve my QMS?
• What is an opportunity for improvement definition?
• What is continual improvement in QMS?
• What is the meaning of NC in an audit?
• How can product audit be improved?
• What does continuous improvement look like?