This is the ‘Rubber Hits the Road’ clause, especially for ISO 9001. The EMS and OHS standards both include the ‘Emergency and Preparedness’ in this section – Operations.

By using a flowchart to illustrate your workflow you’ll be able to meet the requirements of 4.4.1 a) and b) – show what the processes are, inputs and outputs and their relationship to each other.

The flowchart also serves as a great map for your Internal Audits. By following the flow you can see the handoffs – the place where most non-conformances take place. Your people know how to do their work. The weakness is usually in getting the work from one spot to the next.

You can add pictograms to your flowcharts to highlight risks: a ‘Q’ for quality issues, a tree for Environmental dangers and a hard hat to identify places that present a physical danger to people. Images are processed by humans 60,000 times faster than text, so it registers instantly. And you can hyperlink to more detailed information as needed.

Finally, use your flowchart to find ways to smooth out workflows, find glitches (hold-ups), hotspots for errors and ways to make results easier to achieve.

Know Quality, Know Profit…No Quality, No Profit

We have easy-to-use tools built into our Cloud-based Management System platform for managing your resources (a ‘New employee orientation’ record, for example). We’d be happy to spend 10 or 15 minutes with you to see if it’s a fit…

Schedule a platform demo

Click here to have a look at the preview for our ‘ISO 9001:2105 Essentials’ online training course:

ISO 9001 Essentials Training Course and Preview