Quality:

A company may be led to seek quality assurance certification due to internal or external factors, or a combination of both.

As to internal reasons, by adopting a good Quality System a company will gain a whole range of benefits, such as cost savings and ongoing improvement in processes and products. Streamlining organisation and devising standardised, controlled and documented processes can only boost a company’s performance, providing it with an ever more important competitive edge in a market that is increasingly reluctant to accept improvisation and lack of organisation.
The quality of a product or service will never exceed that of the process that generated it.

As to external factors, companies are encouraged to become quality-certified as a result of a more or less binding request by public and private customers to do so. A number of industrial groups have long been requesting that their suppliers adopt a quality system which is more dependable in terms of supply output while affording simpler control methods.

According to the UNI EN ISO 9001:2000 standard, as a whole a Quality Management System consists of the following items:

• Organisational Structure
• Accountability
• Procedures
• Practices
• Resources

PHASE 1 - ANALYSIS

PHASE 2 - DRAFTING A QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

• Manual
  It describes the quality management system, with special reference to:
  • Quality and general quality-related policies as formally identified by the company.
    
  • Responsibilities, authorities and mutual relationships of the functions that run, execute, check or review the operations that affect quality.
    
  • Description of operation and management processes as well as activities aimed at ensuring quality and attaining ongoing improvement.
    
• Procedures and Instructions
  Procedures and instructions are on the other hand documents that, at different degrees of operating detail, outline and describe the way certain operations are performed (organisational structure, procedures and resources required).
• Logs
  Computer programmes or documents storing data and information on how operations are performed ensure a correct planning, functioning and control of the completed processes.

PHASE 3 - PRE-AUDIT

PHASE 4 - RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE CERTIFYING AUTHORITIES AND SUPPORT DURING THE CERTIFICATION VISIT

PHASE 5 - TRAINING

PHASE 6 - MAINTENANCE