Just about a week ago, I got a comment on one of these posts that (in a sense) I had been waiting for since I started the blog. The comment, by a reader named Scotlyn, was in response to my post asking whether the Russo-Ukrainian War might bring about the end of the global standardization and certification schema, but it raised issues that go far beyond even as broad a topic as the war.
As for saying that I've been waiting since the start of this blog, you remember that right in my very first post I explained that my fundamental goal here is to encourage people to talk back to their Quality systems, forcing the Quality systems to justify themselves in ways that make sense. I said I wanted to discuss "what works and what doesn't work" – and I tried to make the point that if a Quality system can't justify itself in rational terms, then we should change it or get rid of it.
Scotlyn's comment is fairly long, so for convenience I'm going to reproduce it here. Then in next week's post, I'll start to answer it. Meanwhile, if you have anything to add to the discussion on your own account, please feel free to comment as well. We can make this conversation as broad and general as it has to be.
So, to begin, Scotlyn wrote as follows:
I have a great personal interest in the theme of standards and certifications, since I worked for many years as compliance officer for a local fish processing company. That is to say, I was the person in the company that interfaced with the global standards and certification industry. By the time I left my job I was convinced of these things:
(1) that the relationship between certified standards and actual quality is fictional. Making the product is one domain that is stubbornly incommensurate with the quite separate domain of documenting, and monitoring compliance with product standards. (in almost exactly the same way as the Tao Te Ching states that the names we can give a thing are not the thing). The standards will never be the products, nor ever be able to satisfactorily describe them.
(2) that, because of (1), it follows that the more standards, the less quality. Standardisation is, in fact, an essential component of the “crapification of things”.
(3) that the relationship between certified standards and the actual economy is parasitic, in that the more jobs that are created to certify, to inspect, to manage, to comply, to produce documentation (including my own entirely non-productive job), the more that productive jobs (the making, transporting of goods, and the providing of services) are destroyed.
(4) that, because of (3), the global standards and certification industry will eventually eat production and the economy, and bring the whole thing to a collapse from too much top-heaviness, and too little bottom sturdiness. Out of which, small, light, and fast non-compliant producers and purveyors who can stay below the radar and out of the limelight, will emerge and begin to create whatever comes next.
I have to tell you that the prospect of a set back to the global certification industry would not cost me a hair’s worry. It contains enough of its own contradictions and unstable weight to collapse without help. Although, to be sure, those employed in its giant documentation fabricating enterprises will resist being made redundant. And it will make thunderous noise as it falls.
On the whole, I'd call that critique pretty thorough. Next week I will take up these points to discuss them. Stay tuned.
Scotlyn, fully agreed to that comment. From my experience, I have seen companies spend lavishly to get the ISO certified, only to decorate their office and hang banners on the shop floor to impress customers that they are ISO certified, but their quality issues and problems remain the same. They run fulltime MRB (Material Review Board) office and staff to resolve the issues, all those issues fixed with a band aid process. In nutshell, ISO is not a problem solver, rather, it is parasitic approach, ISO inventors are the benefactors, they suck the juice of the corporations and get rich. This ISO standardization process yields nothing but creates more problems creates mountains of paperwork with No technical merit and value. This is the right time to start a new system, we do not want a system-one size fits for all, that does not work. I want to bring another nonproductive process or system is the "Statistical Process Control and Statistical Quality Control" this is another parasitic approach of no Value to the customer or the corporations. They pretend that they are the problem solvers, but they create more problems, blood suckers of the system. Process ignorant corporate officers have no clue what the SPC does, they purely believe that more charts and graphs are enough for them to see in paper how the problems are resolved but in reality, their technical problem remains the same or getting worst.
ReplyDeleteLet us start Transformational Quality Management System and Industrial Statistics, these are the only system models needed for any manufacturing industries. Instead of third-party certification, go for second party certification, this will prove more value to the user and turns more productive and promises business growth.
contact me at: bmatthewbob@gmail.com or visit web site-https://www.qem-inc.com
Let us start a new life with the new system.
Servant, thank you for a heartfelt agreement with my assessment.
DeleteAs to your kind, if religious-sounding, invitation to contact and join you in "starting a new life with a new system"... I'm afraid I shall decline.
Please enjoy your new system, and your new life, all the same!
Best, Scotlyn
Scotlyn, you state that you were the Compliance Officer for a local fish processing company and also refer to 'product standards' but do not actually mention any specific standards. So what standards are you referring to? Are you referring to ISO 9001, ISO 22000, FSSC 22000 and/or which 'product standards'. ISO 22000:2018 - Food Safety Management System (FSMS), unsurprisingly, requires substantial documentation. So, if you had to maintain certification to that standard, that alone would explain the burden of documentation. You state 'Making the product is one domain that is stubbornly incommensurate with the quite separate domain of documenting, and monitoring compliance with product standards'. Are you seriously implying that (food) producers should be left alone and trusted to produce good quality products, untroubled by the need to comply with product standards? I manage certification to ISO 9001 for a small company, and in the past have simultaneously maintained certification to ISO/IEC 27001 - Information Security Management. It requires a considerable amount of documentation, some parts of which are more useful than others. However, if standards required less documentation, certification audits would inevitably need to be longer and more expensive. aprmason@gmail.com
ReplyDeleteHello Anthony, those are fair questions. As a sole holder of all "compliance" hats (food safety management, health and safety management, quality control and HR) for this small company, I implemented the following systems *de novo*: BRC (mainly HACCP), MSC (in relation to wild caught fish), and an IOA (Irish Organic Association) Certified Product Scheme (in relation to farmed fish). ISO 22000:2018 was on the cards when I left the job, at which point I was training in three people to replace me, in a company which maintained around 10-12 people on the factory floor, and 3-5 people in the transport department. If this trend continued, the proportion of personnel dedicated to compliance, documentation and monitoring, would soon dwarf the personnel dedicated to production. In fact the company was attempting to reduce the number of production jobs, just as it found itself required to add to its compliance jobs.
DeleteAs to: "Are you seriously implying that (food) producers should be left alone and trusted to produce good quality products, untroubled by the need to comply with product standards?" I will treat this one as a rhetorical question.
Although I would point out that when smaller local food producers used to rub shoulders with their nearby customers, said customers could carry out their own quality checks by, say, visiting whenever they felt like it, interrogating their own friends and neighbours working in the business, and keeping a good ear out for local gossip on the local grapevine... ;)
As someone who has arguably become ISO's top critic, since John Seddon backed into the shadows, I have to say this criticism is outright batty.
ReplyDeleteThe argument appears to rely on one person's anecdote, rather than any substantial studies. Fair enough, but it needs to be framed that way, too. There's also a bit is disingenuous debating going on here; for example, dismissing a valid question as "rhetorical" to escape having to answer it. Lame. In a comment to Part 2, they say they don't want to discuss "intent," but then they assign all kinds of intent on the part of "those employed in its giant documentation facilitating enterprises." Also lame.
The ISO scheme has two key problems, as demonstrated from decades of evidence in the public domain. First, ISO is a publishing company, and makes money by publishing books. They happen to call these "standards," but they are books. Therefore, ISO makes more money when it contributes to the proliferation of standards. Such proliferation alone may or may not be a problem -- each industry or technology may need its own standard -- but having one conflicted publisher manage it most definitely IS a problem. In this case, the problem isn't the quantity of standards -- which Scotlyn seems particularly focused on, after only having to deal with only THREE -- but the quality of them, due to the intent of the publisher.
Second is the corruption in the certification schemes themselves, as each party pays the one tasked with overseeing them. This invites pay-to-play scams and outright corruption, and is the main factor in crippling any credibility such certificates have. Scotlyn doesn't mention this at all, which is a glaring oversight.
Their solution? An absolutely bizarre return to the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, and massive increase in customer audits: "customers could carry out their own quality checks by, say, visiting whenever they felt like it, interrogating their own friends and neighbours working in the business, and keeping a good ear out for local gossip on the local grapevine." Seriously... WTF? How is that at all workable?
Hint: it's not. Certifications were intended to REDUCE 2nd party auditing. Whether they succeeded is a valid debate, but returning to those days? If her company is overworked now, just imagine how they'd feel if they had to host multiple customer audits every month.
Scotlyn also conflates problems in a thing WITH the thing. Yes, some QMS companies over-document. Some under-document. Some get it just right. But because some companies are dumb and overdo it doesn't mean the entire scheme is wrong. ISO has moved in the opposite direction, requiring nearly ZERO documents, resulting in risk to product safety and public health. You can get certified now with no documents at all. Meanwhile, professionals know that documents matter. Your airplane pilot uses procedures and checklists to maintain flight safety, your pharmaceutical company uses documentation to ensure consistent, safe results. "Documents" remain a bogeyman only for the uninformed, and people who hate to read.
If your company has overdocumented, that's on them. Not on the standards, for heaven's sake.
Scotlyn also reveals, by accident, that they were working for one of those companies that clearly doesn't give a squat about quality to begin with anyway. They were assigned the roles of food safety, OH&S, QMS *and* human resources? No wonder they are disgruntled! Scotlyn is the effect of the problem they are arguing about. A company implemented things poorly, then wonders why they are off the rails?
This is a company problem, not a problem with standards or certifications.
As I said, there ARE problems with certification schemes. But they are far more broad, more impactful, and more important than one person upset because they were overworked by a company that clearly had no clue.
Hi Chris!
DeleteThank you very much for this detailed engagement with the topic. You have anticipated some of the things I was planning to write too. (I wrote my initial reply all at once, but had to break it up because it was too long.) At the same time, there are a couple of spots where you and I read Scotlyn's remarks in different ways.
Most basically, I never thought Scotlyn was offering a systematic analysis or criticism: wide-ranging, yes, but something more like a cri de coeur. Very different from the kind of work you do. (And hence the absence of any studies.) In the same way, when she treated one of Mr. Mason's questions as "rhetorical," I took that to be a synonym for "nolo contendere." That's why in Part 2, I suggest that it's pretty uncontroversial to keep some health and safety standards in place, because getting rid of them all just seems like a really bad idea.
On the other hand, I do think Scotlyn was onto something when she observed that her company was replacing her one role with three (at the time that she left), even as they were reducing the number of production jobs; and if I'm doing the arithmetic right, this was in a company of no more than about 20 people. Increasing the Quality staff from 5% of the company to 15% looks like a lot. It's possible that these changes were just the result of Scotlyn's own company implementing their standards in a bad way. (Plenty of companies do.) But I can see why she was concerned.
I take up this question of Quality jobs displacing production jobs in Part 4, where (spoiler alert) I argue that the solution is not to eliminate the Quality role completely, but to find the optimum size where it delivers the most benefit and then keep it there. That's not always easy.
Thank you again, as always, for joining the conversation.