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.

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.

Not complex at all. Basically the KISS principle applies to document numbering as well as document headers and footers. Think about it. When you are reading a document, whether it is a procedure or a record, you are most interested on the contents of the document and the quality of it, rather than how long the document number is or whether the President of the company signed and reviewed the document. Is that allowed by ISO? Well, let’s look at the actual requirements of the standard and figure out what we need to do to add value and reduce pain.