Introduction

In April 2018, I wrote a piece entitled “Whither ISO Certifications?”  In that piece, I discussed the latest certification numbers as reported by the International Organization for Standardization  (ISO). It was noted that overall certifications were down by 2% in 2017 compared to 2016.  In addition, certifications for ISO 9001:2015 were down by 4%. ISO has released the numbers for 2018.  This piece looks at these numbers and their implications for quality management.

This regular column in The Auditor is intended to shine a light on the people, standards, and events that mean the most to auditors and registered organizations.

In this segment, we chat with Greg Hutchins, the founder of the Certified Enterprise Risk Manager (CERM) Academy and author of the books, Value Added Auditing, RiskBased Auditing, Supply Chain Risk Management, and ISO31000:2018. He is offering a presentation titled, “The Future of (Quality) Auditing” during Exemplar Global’s forthcoming Future of Auditing Expo.

This four-part article explores the nature of truth through the prism of quality, mass media, culture, and art. In part one, we posed the question of why truth matters, and considered how the quality professional’s toolkit can help mine mountains of data to uncover hidden nuggets of meaningful information. In part two, we delved into how media helps and hurts in the quest for truth.

For as long as quality has been part of the human endeavour we have been measuring those products and services we provide.

Context of measurement

Quality control as a practice has been around ever since man has been making things.  There is even a school of thought that evolution itself is a form of quality control. One favoured term is “survival of the fittest.”  Continue reading →