The Provision of Quality Awareness Programmes Amongst Companies and Organisations Seeking BS5750 Registration

Abstract

With the growth of quality system implementation in the UK has come an increase in the number of companies and organisations seeking to achieve BS5750 certification. Although the development of this Standard was initially the province of the manufacturing sector, this is no longer the case. The increase in certification amongst service industries has not only widened the range of companies and organisations seeking registration, but increased the types of activities covered and brought the requirements of the Standard into contact with different organisational cultures. The fact that BS5750/EN29000/ISO9000 was geared towards manufacturing industries brought problems of interpretation when it began to be taken into the service sector since some of its requirements could not be transferred easily into non-manufacturing environments. The question of interpretation is not solely industry specific, however, since any company and/or organisation may have problems in construing the requirements of the Standard may occur whenever the wording of BS5750 apparently permits latitude in interpretation. Whilst there are several instances within the Standard where this might be said to be true, the particular area of this study has been chosen because of its central role in the overall picture. The objective of this research is twofold, firstly to examine the way in which companies and/or organisations have interpreted the requirement within BS5750 to ensure that their quality policy is understood, implemented ad maintained, and secondly to ascertain how the assessors of BS5750 quality management systems themselves interpret that requirement. The methodology of gathering information from companies and organisations on the methods they adopted is described, together with an analysis of the data generated. Three case studies are included in an attempt to give more detailed examples of the ways in which awareness programmes can be approached. The methodology behind the questionnaires for assessors is explained, as well as analysis of the results. The research data suggests that because of a number of identified factors companies and organisations employ a wide range of methods when seeking to raise staff quality/BS5750 awareness. In addition, the data also suggests some wide variation in the way in which individual quality system assessors interpret the requirement, and the principal recommendation of the research is that greater attention needs to be paid by those with influence on the assessment process to ensuring greater uniformity of interpretation.