ISO 9001 Clause 5.2 – The Quality Policy
To craft a quality policy that serves your company, you need to dig deep. What drives your company at its core?
Three fundamentals help answer that question:
Purpose: On a fundamental level, why does your organization exist?
Context: What internal and external issues affect your organization, and what other parties are involved?
Strategic Direction: What is the desired path of progress for your organization?
These three fundamentals form basis of a unified direction. You’ve likely already defined them in other documents. But if not, top management should take the time define these elements.
As you write your quality policy, you will weave together purpose, context, and strategic direction into a single statement focused on quality goals and commitments.
Remember to keep this policy specific to your business. ISO 9001 isn’t about every business doing the exact same things. It’s about you doing what will drive improvement in your organization
Some Quality Policy Examples
Let’s look some practical examples of how you might channel these fundamentals into your written statement.
Example #1 – Manufacturing
Take the example of a manufacturing company called XYZ Products:
First, they define their purpose, context, and strategic direction:
Purpose: Manufacturing precision products
Context: Small workforce, new fierce competitors entering the market
Strategic Direction: Maintain and expand market share and offer new, innovative products
From these fundamentals, XYZ Products crafts the following quality management statement
“XYZ Products is committed to manufacturing cutting edge products of an extremely high quality to our existing and growing customer base in an accurate and timely manner. We satisfy all customer and ISO 9001:2015 requirements and continually improve our processes to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.”
Take another look at XYZ’s purpose, context, and direction. Can you see how they weaved those elements into their quality policy?
Example #2 – Service
Let’s look at another example. Consider a service company called Widget Services, Inc.
Purpose: Providing network management and support services
Context: Consistently changing technology, high-cost industry, large number of competitors
Strategic Direction: Provide superior services to edge out competition to maintain existing client relationships and expand into new markets.
These fundamentals translate to the following quality policy:
“Widget Services, Inc. strives to provide superior consulting services in network management and to assist clients by completing tasks in a prompt manner, without compromising quality and customer service. We will assist our customers in product and solution development to achieve top quality at the lowest possible cost. We are committed to continual improvement of our services and proudly adhere to ISO requirements for excellence. It is essential that we meet or exceed our customers’ expectations and all other applicable requirements for our industry.”
Again, you can draw clear lines from Widget’s fundamentals to their quality policy. Notice that this statement is somewhat longer than our previous example. Remember: there’s no set format or template. It’s about what works for your specific organization.
