Business Advisor Network Blog

ISO9001:2008 – Quality Management System Requirements

Setting up and implementing a quality management system to meet ISO9001:2008 requirements will create benefit for your business by assisting in reducing costs and rework plus eliminating inefficiencies.

It provides a structure that makes it quick and easy to find business documents from your cherished business plan including your vision and mission to those important records generated by the business. The records might include, results and actions coming from conducting a management review, achievement of process and product requirements, product conformity and acceptance criteria, training records. Records that auditors or legal practitioners may request if you have had some issue occur within the business that has brought about an investigation or an audit.

The ISO9001:2008 requirements and particularly the guidelines, provide great ideas for managing non conformance of your products or services and preventing them being delivered to customers.

The other great activity that the system promotes is to manage corrective and preventive action to facilitate the reduction in rework, waste and ineffective processes. The beauty of having a system in place is it allows you to manage and control your business rather than the business manage and control you. The business will have a better percentage of producing a quality product and/or service consistently over time rather than producing mishaps that have to be managed more intensively.

It only takes the business and staff some applied discipline to key areas and the benefits are achieved for example:

Cost reduction through improved product reliability, better process control and flow, better documentation of processes, greater employee quality awareness, reductions in product scrap, reworks and rejections.

Key questions to consider in relation to a Quality Management System:

Do you know if your business creates a lot of waste in producing products for sale, or in providing a service?

Do you know how much rework is done on a daily basis throughout your business operations, do you record or keep track of this information?

What business activities do you rely on the most in generating your business revenue and if you do how clear is it to staff on how to do them?

Do you capture results of business activities (i.e. what has been produced in what time frame and to what standard?)

Are your documents dated, do you know if it is the most recent version, has it been authorised for publication, are key documents made available to personnel?

by Kirsteen Rowntree (Quality and Process Improvement Specialist)

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This post follows on from the “Why do I need CRM” post. It looks at the common pitfalls of implementing a CRM system.  Where the implementation of CRM tends to go horribly wrong is that is morphs from a simple system to deal with customers in an organised fashion, to an expansive enterprise wide system that has more interfaces than IBM. As a general rule, the larger the business, the more challenging it is to implement CRM as there will be many more touch-points with a customer to consider (sales, installation, maintenance, warranty, billings, accounts receivable, service departments, warehouse, distribution, suppliers, etc).

So the strategy, planning and pre-implementation processes for installing a new CRM system are vital.   A quick checklist for this is:

Strategy

Vital as this sets the scene for what the CRM will be designed to do. If the strategy is to merely put all past sales, sales targets and quotes into an electronic form (a common start for many small businesses) – don’t let a software vendor up-sell your needs. If the strategy is to incorporate all processes and points in the business in dealing with customers, this is generally a huge project that needs professional support to deliver.

Planning

Once the strategy has been determined, planning is essential. This covers selecting a CRM product, mapping all the business processes that will be covered by the CRM, what type of information needs to be captured, who takes responsibility for its installation, timing considerations (for both your business and the software vendor), what new hardware is required, etc.

Pre-Implementation

Identify who is doing what, when it needs to be delivered, can your staff deliver to requirements whilst still doing their own job, physical access issues, payment details on all requirements, financing of payments, detailed Gantt chart to ensure that critical path issues are identified.

This is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but more to get thinking of all the issues before they become real issues.

CRM can be the single most important tool in your business if you know why you need it and make sure that you only get what you need.

Marshall Vann – Realistic Business Solutions

How to book a meeting with a business advisor, mentor or coach?
Find out about Government Grants for Queensland business?
Would you like to become an Accredited Advisor?
Need information on how to prepare a business plan?
Do you want a step by step guide to growing your business?
Become a sponsor or partner of BAN and connect with small business decision makers?
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CRM stands customer relationship management (or complete royal mess for those who have attempted and failed) generally via some type of computer software. The number of businesses I have run across that have no CRM is mind boggling – customer information either sits in a pile in a corner or resides in customer files that sit on a shelf.This is normally the case because the business has grown and the owner is flat out keeping up with sales. However, when either things slow down a bit, or even better, a business owner manages to get out of the business to work on the business some of the time – CRM becomes a quick focus.

The old saying of “20% of customers create 80% of sales” generally holds true in most businesses. So owners will know the “valuable” customers and give them good service and pricing. But what about the other 80% – why are they not valuable, why don’t they buy more, when was the last time the business contacted them?

So the challenge is to get the information that a business already has and use it to improve service to customers, improve communication to customers, up-sell to existing customers and sell to potential new customers. This is CRM territory and in many ways, picking some low hanging fruit for a business’s sales effort.

Some of the key simple information you want about customers are:

Name and address
Corporate information
Key contact details (remember may change between sales and service)
Account number
Sales made to them (this week, this month, last month, last 6 months, last year, etc)
Quotes given to them
Quotes accepted
Quotes declined (and reason why)
Outstanding quotes (last follow-up, why not accepted yet)
Outbound communication trail (last, how made, when, why, etc)
Inbound communication trail (why, what, how dealt with, follow-up, etc)
Special offers made to them (particularly if not made to entire customer base)
Work scheduling (any work that is scheduled for them in future)
Service calls (when last made, frequency, comments from your service department)
Complaints (what, why and how dealt with)

Despite all the horror stories that abound about CRM systems and particularly failed installations, they are more than enough compelling business reasons to look at using a CRM system.

The main question – how much and what breadth do you need?

The next post will look at CRM implementation.

Marshall Vann – Realistic Business Solutions

How to book a meeting with a business advisor, mentor or coach?
Find out about Government Grants for Queensland business?
Would you like to become an Accredited Advisor?
Need information on how to prepare a business plan?
Do you want a step by step guide to growing your business?
Become a sponsor or partner of BAN and connect with small business decision makers?
I wish to make a donation to help small business.