If you know the story of BP's spill response plan, chances are, you know it talked about saving walruses, sea lions and more walruses. While that is all fine in paper, now that the spill disaster has happened, the plan proved not only to be flawed but false. To begin with, the plan was big on saving walruses and sea lions -which as one of the congressman pointed out, have not lived in the Gulf area for nearly 300 years. To compound matters worse, the spill response plans from Exxon, Shell and Texaco read almost exactly the same as if they had all been written, bought or copied from the same source. This proves a point that I have long made, and that is, procedures have to match the company processes, and each organization has their own set of processes which is different than that of their neighbor.

Are you a service provider selling project management services, engineering or IT services? Have you been asked more than once whether you are ISO 9001 certified and wonder what is all that about? Before you tell your prospective client they have an error on their forms, see why more and more organizations are demanding their suppliers –materials and service – to become ISO 9001 certified.

If your company continuously ships goods across the border and in and out from overseas, more than likely you are looking to become a C-TPAT partner in order to speed up the customs process. Learn how a company achieved C-TPAT status and ISO 9001 certification by combining C-TPAT requirements with the ISO 9001 standard requirements.

Do you ever feel that even though you have a lot of procedures your QMS system seems unfulfilling and unable to add value to your company? Do you feel the lack of adherence to your QMS system is perhaps a lack of understanding of your QMS? If you answer is yes to these questions then perhaps the cause of your problems can be a basic case of lack of good process mapping.

Are you confused as to whether your organization needs to implement goals, objectives or KPIs? Do you know the difference between objectives and targets? Let’s see what each one brings, what you really need and how many of those you need to implement in your organization.

I was recently at a meeting with some colleagues and the subject of forged certificates was brought up. We discussed the fact that some organizations do have the audacity of not just creating a fake certificate, but sometimes even wanting to change registrars. Seems odd? Later on, I was asked by a reader for some tips on how to find out if a registration or certificate is valid or not. The reader noticed while auditing their potential supplier that the processes in this company did not look very much in control the way an ISO certified company would.

So here I'm with some concise steps and links that can hopefully help anybody confirm if a certain organization is indeed ISO certified.

In case you are not sure if the equipment you are currently using for your monitoring and measuring activities is the most adequate equipment or if you are wondering why such as expensive tool is used to inspect a certain part, then it may be worth for you to understand tolerances, accuracy and what the impact of the equipment on meeting your specification requirements is.