Leadership and the ISO Management System Standards

  The importance of Root Cause Analysis Root cause analysis is a critical activity to help organizations to prevent recurrence of incidents. It saves the organization time and money in the long run. It forms part of the concept of risk-based-thinking as required in all the new generation management system standards. Root cause analysis is a process designed for use in investigating and categorizing the root or basic causes of events with safety and health, environmental, quality, reliability and production impacts. The event is an incident, which is any occurrence which is undesirable. It could or does result in harm to the environment, persons or property, although not always. More will be said about this later. We do root cause analysis because, seldom, if ever, will we find that the most apparent causes for the incident are the real causes. Several techniques are available to enable us to properly investigate incidents and find the root causes. In future I will discuss...

Documentation Requirements for Environmental Management Systems according to the requirements of ISO 14001:2015 Introduction Many organizations tend to over-document when they design and implement management systems in general. Environmental management systems (EMS) based on the requirements of ISO 14001:2015 are no exception. Although there are a few mandatory documents required by the standard, it leaves the choice of other documents to be created to the discretion of the company implementing the system. Mandatory Documents According to the requirements of the standard, the following documents have to be created: Document Clause Nr Scope of the environmental management system 4.3 Environmental policy 5.2 Procedure for the identification and evaluation of environmental aspects (especially criteria for determining significance) 6.1.2 Environmental objectives and plans to achiev...

How do we deal with clause 8.3: Design and Development? Not many companies are involved in design and development activities. If this is the case, we simply exclude the requirements of clause 8.3 of ISO 9001:2015 - Design and Development. But how do we handle it if the organization is involved in design and development activities?  If the organization is involved in serious systems development activities, such as aircraft, the armaments industry, ships, software systems, etc, it would normally have a design process in place based on best practices for that industry sector. Companies involved in the defense industry will use something like the Defense Acquisition Handbook which is based on DoD Directive 5000.1 and DoD Instruction 5000.2. This handbook, however, consists of over 500 pages, and will certainly not apply as is to all other types of organizations!  In most cases, we have a customer who wants something, tells us what he wants, we develop a solution, build it and...