Several years ago, having a Management System ISO 9001, 14001, 15189, etc. certified or accredited (as the case may be) was a competitive advantage for the few companies that had this recognition, since at that time they were the only ones to have it.
When a regulation comes out for the first time, it is normal for implementations and certifications to be concentrated in a few companies that are usually already leaders in their industry. This has several reasons. Some of them are the following:
- The cost of implementation, as well as certification, is very high as there are very few competent people on the subject. As other people are trained, they begin to offer consulting and auditing services, so costs begin to fall and it becomes more affordable for companies to hire these services. They do not know what benefits the implementation of the system could bring them. Also, some may not need it at the moment as there is no pressure from their customers or the market. In short, they have a short-term vision. As soon as the market starts demanding the adoption of ISO standards these companies start racing to get certified overnight, it could also be a combination of both. For example,The organization may have evaluated that the benefit vs. the effort to implement the system is not enough to justify the investment in the present, however they establish it within their strategic plan for the coming years, since in that same evaluation they realized that in the future it could be an essential requirement to be able to enter other markets or remain in those that already exist.
For these companies that manage to implement and certify (or accredit) an ISO system, they have a competitive advantage over the others. Well, they can demonstrate to their clients that their processes operate in a way that allows the achievement of the desired result (environmental performance, quality, etc.) and in the case of accreditations they demonstrate that they are competent in the tasks they perform.
But this advantage is for a limited time. As other organizations adopt the regulations, that advantage that companies enjoyed disappears. In the end, the implementation of a management system (be it quality, environment, among others) becomes a minimum requirement to be able to compete.
An example of this is the measure taken by the French government in 2010 that obliges all clinical laboratories (private, public, university, etc.) to be accredited to the ISO 15189 standard by 2016 (AFNOR, 2013), and by November of this year, 2013, these laboratories must present evidence that they have started the accreditation process (European Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine, 2013). With this measure, the government ensures that all laboratories in the country provide reliable results with the least amount of variation between one laboratory and another. In this way, ISO 15189 is already the minimum to be met by a French laboratory and not a competitive advantage.
With ISO 9001 it is the same case. Worldwide there are thousands of organizations certified under this standard and others operate following its requirements, even if they are not certified. There are markets that require ISO 9001 in order to export, or a sector-specific standard such as ISO 22000 in the food manufacturing industry.
In conclusion, when adopting a management system it is important that companies understand that nowadays it no longer means a competitive advantage, so they cannot expect a certification to be the answer to achieve the business objectives, rather, if they do not count with a system they simply cannot compete. However, this does not mean that in all industries management systems do not mean an advantage over competitors, but one thing is certain, and that is that this advantage will disappear over time.
Sources
- AFNOR. (March 20 2013). www.afnor.org. Retrieved April 08, 2013, from http://www.afnor.org/profils/activite/sante-et-medico-social/European Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine. (2013). http://efcclm.eu/. Retrieved on April 8, 2013, from
