DECISION-MAKING MODEL FOR ISO REGISTRAR SELECTION
By Jurita Anschutz, Marketing and Quality Manager, Great Plains Packaging, Hastings, Nebraska
RELEVANCE
One of the most important decisions to be made when pursuing certification to an ISO 9000 Quality System Standard is that of choosing your registrar. This is also a very time consuming and arduous task. With a considerable amount of money and your companys reputation at stake, this is certainly a task that demands thoughtful deliberation. Selection of a registrar who doesnt understand your business or whose interpretation of ISO requirements differ significantly from yours, could place you in a position of:
Spending an unnecessary amount of time justifying your processes.
Experiencing delays resulting from focusing on areas that may need attention from a profit-improvement standpoint (we all have those areas), but which would have no impact on quality systems that could affect the quality of the product being produced.
Having to reestablish workforce/management commitment levels that were damaged by auditors who created frustration/negativity by inadvertently or otherwise challenging competencies or pole-vaulting over mouse feces (or, perhaps more eloquently stated, overemphasizing the small things).
Losing face with customers and incurring more costs because your certification was suspended/withdrawn.
Enough said. Selection of the right registrar for your company will enhance your certification process and ultimately contribute to the betterment of your company.
PRELIMINARIES
Having realized the importance of the registrar selection process, I, as ISO Management Representative for Great Plains Packaging, began the process with these initial steps:
Reviewing literature regarding thought processes recommended when selecting a registrar.
Identifying those registrars whose scope contained our SIC (there were 12) and narrowing that list to a manageable number of companies for further evaluation. I talked to at least one of their customers, and reviewed what information I could obtain about the companies. Our own customers who were ISO certified were an invaluable resource for me during this stage.
Developing a list of questions for the registrars that would provide us with essential information for decision making (there are numerous books/articles available on this subject).
Six registrars were selected for further consideration, and their responses to my list of questions were received. One of the six registrars was eliminated immediately because of total costs involved compared to the other five. However, the other five were not so easy to evaluate. I was overwhelmed with the amount of information that I now had to examine and compile in some sort of usable format. Hence, the purpose of this article.
My list of questions totaled approximately 40. I selected 29 of those questions to include as factors in my assessment. I assigned weight to each of the 29 factors in accordance with their relative importance, for a total of 100 possible points. For example, I gave total anticipated costs 10 points and local assessors 2 points. Obviously, assigning these weights is totally subjective based on what is important to your organization.
The five companies assessed are listed across the top of the matrix. Each companys response to each question was assigned a rating (based on a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 being low). Each rating was then multiplied by the assigned weight to arrive at a weighted rating. The totals are listed at the bottom, and the weighted rating totals are identified from highest to lowest.
Although this sounds relatively easy, only one of the companies solicited answered each of my questions. The rest sent me their company packets with a cover letter stating something to the effect that review of their literature should provide answers to my questions. Not only did I have to dig for the information for which I needed answers, but I had to place several phone calls to those companies to ensure my comparison of the responses represented apples to apples.
I believe the decision-making model I developed to assist me will help others who face this same quandary. It allowed me to substantiate my selection to the President of our company who made the final decision, and also produced results that subsequently proved to be the right choice. We have been completely satisfied with our selected registrarOrion Registrar, Inc., Arvada, Colorado.
