How to Prepare for ISO 9001 in 4 Months and Nail It: An Interview with Aleksandr Bobryshev
Meeting standards is a vital part of any business, and says to the world that the company is capable of reaching its goals. We sat down with Aleksandr Bobryshev, the Chief Design Engineer, for him to tell us about how WayRay managed to achieve an ISO certification, and why this is so important. The following is from Aleksandr himself.
What is an ISO, and why is it important?
This year WayRay got an ISO certificate which is one of the most popular proofs of quality management systems. Many companies use this approach to standardize and organize their internal processes. This standard was invented around 30 years ago and usually, for high tech and deep-tech companies, it is the first step to the most advanced certificate, such as a certificate for medical devices or automotive, because the companies make something, such as products, and services, which can be critical to the environment, to health, or human life. These standards can include several approaches as to how to manage risks.
“So, why is it so important for deep-tech companies? Because the main issue in startups is the organizational costs”
Often people are doing what they see and they think are necessary things, but in fact, this is not 100% true, and ISO standardizes the minimal requirements for internal processes. For example, how you design things, how you hire people, how you organize your testing, how you organize your approach, how to deliver things to customers, and how you work with customers. It’s not like the book of answers on how exactly to do these things, but the standard just contains some description of what you have to do, to create a successful organization. It means, of course, you can add something from your side, but there are minimum requirements, and it is a way to prove to another organization that you know what to do. It’s not necessarily super strict and it depends on the version of the standard because we have used an international version and we were audited by a German certification body too.
“ISO Itself is the first requirement to becoming an automotive supplier”
If you don’t have any certification of your quality management system, no one will really work with you with serious contracts, because if you don’t have several procedures or methodology, you can’t prove to your customer that the customer is on the safe side. Many automotive companies are safety rated because it can affect the safety of drivers and other people. And for this, you should follow the rules, which the ISO gives. And also, the ISO can provide additional help. It creates a structured way of working and production. For example, before ISO, we didn’t have a process for proper documentation management. Then it becomes a typical issue that you just have a paper with the rules on the table, but you don’t know if it is an actual paper, are they the proper rules or did some pranksters just print them and leave them on the table. No one knows and no one can really follow what was written on the table. And also it helps to standardize the way of doing things, for the company to measure activity, processes and establish some more or less realistic, but not necessarily complex, KPI’s (key performance indicator).
“How do you understand that you are effective? That you are doing things the right way? Maybe you need to change something. Without tracking and without a KPI it’s impossible. It’s just a gut feeling, and half of assumptions are wrong”
How we got started
We decided that we need to go to the ISO at the start of last year. In the first half of the year, we just spent time identifying what kind of certification we need, what kinds of locations we should be certified in. Then we found TÜV in Germany and a consultant who helped us in several areas. Then around August-September, we made a gap analysis of the organization. Gap analysis is a type of situation in consulting where you are diagnosing the company and trying to find the areas you should improve or do something in.
The first list, as I remember, contained several hundred points for the whole company. The main plus of the approach is that we started to find similarities in the tasks. We created a dedicated group to address activities quickly. Some activities in multiple departments were similar, and we made universal procedures for several areas and then split and spread the procedures among them. The basic procedures, writing, and implementation took around 1 month and it was a huge amount of work, but we successfully set up the KPI and started to track it.
From start to finish in four months: How is it possible?
Deadline
Usually, in ISO rules and practice, it takes around a year from setting up the system to going to certification, but we found a kind of “shortcut”. Because in ISO you can’t find the real period within which you should create an organizational system. It’s written that you should have a system, make some analysis and track KPI. So, we decided to do this in a quarter, rather than a year. During the quarter we started to track KPI’s and also, at the same time, we set the date for the audit. We started to implement everything in August and everything was completed at the end of October. It took around 3 months from zero to ISO readiness. In November, we had a management review, it’s the main procedure in ISO before you go to the audit, and that was in my opinion the completion of the project internally.
Motivation
That deadline was a big part of why it was possible to do it so quickly, but there are two other reasons. The first is a motivated team. Everyone in the team involved was super motivated to standardise things. It really helps, because usually in organizations, standardization and certification are initiated only by quality managers and no one else cares about what happens. Therefore, a lot of people sometimes just keep doing useless activities. But in our case, we cannot be an automotive supplier without it. That’s why everyone had to understand the necessity of ISO.
The sculpture principle
The other reason is probably not invented by me, but I describe it as a sculpture principle for the process making. The principle is that when you don’t know exactly how the sculpture will look like, you start to cut the stone somehow anyway. After several cuts, you will have a really beautiful sculpture. So, we just created a procedure and started to use it, even though we knew that the procedure is not ideal, we used it anyway and improved it through trial and error. Usually, after several cuts, the procedure is much more workable. I think that the sculpture principle, and using the minimum resources, works better than being perfectionistic. Together they create the fastest way to implement everything.
Keeping things simple
“An additional thing is the simplification of the procedure and using simple well-known tools”
If you are a big company with a long history and a huge amount of documentation, you sometimes use paper documents and sometimes use Excel sheets. The requirements of ISO are traceability and identification of everything. You need to trace and identify documents. Meaning each document should have a version, an author, someone who approved the document with a signature, and you should be sure that the version is legitimate, because the documents are always changing, and someone should track the documents. A technical organization has what feels like a million documents. So, of course, it’s impossible to track every Dropbox folder, every Excel document on the computer, and every paper document in cabinets. And for this, we use our existing system, Confluence, for document tracking, because we’ve observed that Confluence itself already has everything tracked. We know who has changed the document, we know when it happened, and can see the settings of the document. We can send the document to review or we can approve the document, it’s 100% traceable, and we know what was changed from the previous version of the document. It was a fast solution for documentation management because that was a huge obstacle.
Also, we tried to move as much as possible to the system. Before that our HR used to use just a Word document and some folder for the job description. Also, engineers had used Word documents for the scope of work definitions and taking meeting notes. However, after ISO determination we started to track everything in Confluence and it became a corporate portal where you can find everything when you have access, of course.
“Every meeting note, all data, every status of each development you can find there”
When our auditor came he wrote that “a big plus of your company is your advanced document management which satisfies any standard”, because we can control everything.
In our production we use Trello, and it’s also a key tool of our production management system. The main secret is that we tried the simplest possible tools, which are super cheap and super user-friendly. Of course, you can buy a huge enterprise system with a big amount of work and spend a hundred years on the integration. But we can’t afford this approach.
Our auditor told us that he had never seen someone else use this kind of thing. Usually, he would come to companies and see a lot of papers, and half of the audit they tried to find papers in the cabinet. Because he would need proof of something, and the guy who is responsible for it will just start searching on the table, in the baskets, and everywhere else. It’s really easy to find the evidence when you have everything on the portal that answers everything.
“The ISO standard can be a driver of new technologies”
Final thoughts: creating a simple approach to organization
I think it’s an opportunity for increasing the speed of designing new technologies. Try to create a hypothesis, and then analyze it, and document the results. After the analysis, you can set up other experiments.
I also suggest providing a really simple way of organizing things. For example, when you have a process of design, you have inputs, the design review, and you have outputs. When you try to create a new production process or some design approach: you have input of what you need to do, the process itself of doing the task, and output — a documented result of how far you are from the input. It’s super convenient and doesn’t require much effort if you are using advanced tools. And after doing it for several years it’s easy not to repeat yourself and analyze what you have.
So Aleksandr has shared with us the benefits of ISO, of providing standards for the company, and also showing how the company maintains these standards, so people will do business. By organizing documentation, with simple tools like Confluence, you can save audit time, and keep track of the endless amount of documents any business inevitably will create. In addition, it is good not to be a perfectionist, but to get started on a process and keep track and analyze data and make improvements as you go. In many ways, keeping things simple, is the best approach to many issues you may face.
