How to formulate your quality policy statement and quality objectives in your ISO quality manual

When embarking on a new quality management system and writing a new quality manual for your organization, one of the most important decisions you have to make is how your quality policy statement should read. A quality policy statement is a requirement of an ISO9001:2000 quality management system and can be viewed as the overall guiding philosophy of your company or organization.

If you compare running a company to steering a ship, the nautical equivalent of a quality policy statement might be something like “Let’s sail to New York.” This is a general statement of the overall goal. In your company’s quality manual, you might say something like “Our goals are to achieve 100 percent customer satisfaction, constantly innovate our products, and continually improve in all our activities.” How can you steer the ship if you don’t know where you want to go?

The quality objectives you choose to include in your quality manual, on the other hand, are the basic, day-to-day objectives that will show how you are doing against your overall goal. Quality objectives are also a requirement of an ISO9001:2000 quality management system and should be included in your quality manual.

Depending on the size and complexity of your organization, I recommend that you have 3-7 quality objectives in your quality manual. Fewer than three is probably inadequate to accurately measure improvement in quality. More than 7 is probably too hard to keep up with and can start to get redundant.

The quality objectives must be measurable based on objective numerical data. A vague statement in your quality manual like “create the best product” is not measurable. The word “best” is a subjective assessment and cannot be accurately measured. Most likely, your quality objectives contain some type of numerical reference. Here are some examples:

• Customer satisfaction rate: 97 percent or more.
• Customer returns: less than 10 per month
• Customer returns: less than 0.5 percent of sales.
• Final inspection rejection rate: Less than 5 percent of units produced.

You must keep records of your organization’s performance. You need to track how you are doing against each of your quality goals. These records will be reviewed by your external auditor in the event you are audited against ISO9001:2000.

Whether or not you’re ISO certified, it’s definitely in your best interest to keep track of where you are in relation to where you want to be. To accurately steer the ship, you not only need to know where you want to go, you also need to know where you currently are.

I recommend that you collect statistics on your quality target performance at least twice a year. Your performance metrics should be one of the inputs to your management review meeting, but you can collect and review the statistics as often as you find useful.

Whether during the course of your management review or at any other time, an analysis of your objective quality performance can be quite revealing. It can validate that you are on the right track or it can point out deficiencies. Hopefully, a regular review of your quality objectives will keep you on track and steer you in the right direction as you seek to continually improve your quality system and your entire organization.

I always recommend that people keep their ISO quality manual as simple as possible, while covering the necessary requirements of ISO9001:2000. Keep your quality policy statement simple, yet meaningful. Keep your quality goals simple, meaningful, and measurable.