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How to Achieve ISO 9001 Certification Without Paper Folders and Excel Lists
There are many digital tools available to make ISO 9001 certification less painful and more effective, but make sure you’re using the right tool for the right type of information
In our company, there isn’t a single paper folder — all information is kept fully digital. Nevertheless, we achieved ISO 9001 certification without any major findings or a helping hand from expensive consultants.
ISO 9001 used to be a static, heavy norm designed to produce folders full of paper processes that collected dust after the certification audit was over. Not so anymore. With its 2015 update, the ISO 9001:2015 norm became more actionable and practical, with more focus being put on living the processes in daily life rather than on completeness on paper.
Being practical people, we asked ourselves the following questions at the beginning of the certification process:
What information changes all the time, and what information needs to be kept consistent?
What information is so important that we have to communicate changes to our workforce?
Where is the “master copy” of each piece of information, and how can we make sure we don’t create inconsistent duplicates?
Only after answering these questions did we start to read the norm to find out if all the required information is available in our company.
Below are the exact steps we took to get ready for the ISO 9001 certification audit.
Step 1: Eliminate Excel lists and use interactive tools
Before starting to define and document our processes, we eliminated as many Excel lists as possible — information stored in Excel lists is often outdated. Instead, we rely on tools such as JIRA to organize important information that changes regularly, for example, risks and assets:
