What is "ISO thinking"?

A while ago, I ran across a thin little book called Why Adopt ISO Thinking? I use the word thin advisedly, as the whole work is less than 50 pages long. But I was curious about the title. I thought to myself, I'm sure I can think of reasons why to adopt it. But what exactly does the author mean by "ISO thinking" anyway?

I should add that the author doesn't approach the question the way I would, which is part of why I wanted to understand his answer. The author, by the way, is Robbie Sheerin of DV Die Cutting in Danvers, Massachusetts; Quality Manager by day, and fiction writer by night. (You can find his personal website here.) As he explains in the foreword, he came to the ISO 9001 standard from a career in welding, machining, and aluminum dip brazing. His perspective is resolutely practical rather than theoretical. He shows no interest in taking the reader on a guided tour of the seven Quality Management Principles, as I did this spring.

What does he find important? He doesn't break it out this way, but I think the three critical points for him are these:

• Standardization
• Root-cause analysis
• Process approach

Over and over, he explains how these simple points can make all the difference in your business, if you take them seriously.

His description of standardization starts with a hair-raising example: the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904.

Aftermath of the Great Baltimore Fire

"With 1231 firefighters, 57 fire engines, nine trucks, two hose companies, one fire boat and one police boat, the fire still raged on for thirty-plus hours. 1526 buildings were destroyed. A total of 2500 businesses were lost. More than 30,000 people were left unemployed, and a staggering $150 million in damages, which in today's money is into the billions. Incredibly, only one person died. Why was the destruction and cost so large? Threads!! Firefighters could not get enough water because of the variety of threads on the hydrants and the hoses." [page 4.]

Sheerin then explains that standardization does more than save lives. Even when lives aren't at stake, it saves money by simplifying operations.

When he sketches out what the clauses of ISO 9001 represent, he gives multiple examples of the right and wrong ways to correct problems or to address customer complaints. He makes it clear that if you address only surface causes then you will have to keep solving the same problem over and over again. This means that the costs for solving that problem never stop adding up. On the other hand, if you can find and address the root cause, you only have to correct it once. So in the long run, doing it right is far cheaper than doing it fast.

As for the process approach, Sheerin introduces this along with root-cause analysis. If you understand your work in terms of processes, you can tell where to act so that you have the most leverage—whether you are fixing a problem or introducing an improvement. And he gives a concrete example which sounds like it might really have happened (or something much like it).

Let's say the customer wants a brass connector. But every time these are produced, there is a small burr .... It has always been removed by hand .... One day the customer complains that the burr is not completely removed or that there are scratches where the burr was removed. A CAR (Corrective Action Report) is created .... During the investigation, it is discovered that the operator does not have adequate hand tools for this job. It also takes the operator 4 hours to rework 500 parts by hand .... [but] by adding a 5-second pass of the part in the machine, the burr can be removed. Now you have removed the rework op and gone from 4 hours to 41 minutes (extra machine time). [page 19.]

Look at the whole process—study it as a process—and you find ways to make the work both easier and more reliable.

Sheerin insists that you can benefit from adopting one or two clauses of ISO 9001, even if you don't bother to comply to the whole thing. When I first picked up the book, that idea sounded odd to me. But this example illustrates what he means. Any improvement is an improve­ment. If you can't afford to take on the whole standard all at once, something is better than nothing. A bit of standardization here, a bit of root-cause analysis there, and an overall awareness of your work as processes—step by step these can help you improve. 

It's a pragmatic approach, and an encouraging one.