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Company wants to let certification expire
Question
February 13, 2009
I am part of a very large Company. In that company we have several manufacturing plants that are ISO certified. Our upper management in the corporation are considering letting our "Corporate" ISO certificate expire and simply certify each plant independently. The plants rely on Corporate for Purchasing, Metrology, Engineering and Customer Sales.
Question: What do think about trying this? There are several of us concerned about attempting this, but, our upper management sees dropping the Corporate Certification as an opportunity to reduce costs. Please let me know what you think, any drawbacks? show stoppers etc... Thanks
Jerry - USA
17262
Answer
Some companies jumped on the ISO 9000 bandwagon for marketing purposes, showing they were a quality company. Many others did so because customer companies or international trade required it.
If your company is not required by its customers to be ISO 9000 certified and see no value in advertising that they are certified, then there may be some logic in letting it expire.
A problem with dropping certification for Purchasing, Metrology, Engineering and Customer Sales is that often self-certification falls by the wayside. Even large companies that maintain ISO 9000 certification find ways to shortcut it and avoid fulfilling the requirements.
If I found that my supplier had a section of Manufacturing certified but did not bother with Engineering, I would be concerned. I would want assurance that the Engineering group was following Best Practices and are documenting what they do.
Streamlining the existing Corporate certification and improving its processes might be more cost effective than letting certification expire.
You can put in your two-cents to upper management, but unfortunately they probably have already made up their minds and aren't interested in any other opinions.
Hopefully, everything will work out for your company and that their decision is the correct one.
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