Does ISO 9001 certification improve quality?

The quick answer is yes, If the resources are properly applied and the systems are properly designed. The creation of a new quality plan requires 2 key elements; a good system design and the appropriate level of resources. The products on this site including our turnkey ISO 9001 quality system are battle-tested solutions that place a minimal burden on the organization. The second key point is that maintaining ISO 9001 certification requires additional resources. If the organization piles the ISO workload on existing employees and does not increase the resources to fulfill the additional requirements, the results will be negative. Pulling resources from the manufacturing engineering or   quality departments to refocusi them on ISO (just to get certification) is not a good plan. 

 In other words there are 2 ways that ISO can actually reduce quality.

1. Insufficient Resources
ISO 9001 Certification is an additional resource load on the company. If resources are not added or they are take away from actions like Engineering Change Orders that resolve quality problems and applied to record keeping (a significant requirement of ISO) or other ISO maintenance requirements, then quality will suffer.

2. Ineffective Implementation.
If the implementation of ISO is done poorly, then the new requirements are too burdensome and continuous improvement suffers. Here is a common example of a inefficient system that will eventually fail. The new engineering change order system (created for the ISO quality system) requires 6-10 signatures (throughout the organization) before a any document can be changed. The cycle time for an ECO increases to 3 to 6 month for every change. People stop improving the products because the system is too burdensome. This results is poor quality, frustrated employees and downward momentum. If the ECO system were designed to be an efficient ECO system, it would have a very positive result on the organization.

In summary, ISO 9000 certification/compliance is designed to improve quality but it requires well-designed systems and adequate resources to positively effect quality.

 If you aren't going to do it right, then don't do it.