Quality Policy
The quality policy is meant to be a statement or a group of statements that reflects your organization’s culture. It does not necessarily have to repeat the sentences or paragraphs contained in the ISO 9001 standard nor include some words contained in the ISO standard, or much less be similar to another company’s quality policy. However there is some caveat. Indeed you have to meet the requirements of the ISO standard in regards of the quality policy. This need not be difficult. We will review one by one the requirements of the standard and give you ideas on how to best accomplish those.
What are the ISO 9001 requirements for Quality Policy?
The ISO 9001:2008 standard requires that a documented quality policy be part of the organization’s quality management system. Specific requirements related to the quality policy are in 3 places:
Section 4.2.1 Documentation Requirements-General, bullet a, requires that the quality management system documentation include a documented statement of a quality policy.
Section 5.3 Quality Policy requires top management to ensure that the quality policy:
is appropriate to the purpose of the organization,
includes a commitment to comply with requirements,
includes a commitment to continually improve the effectiveness of the quality management system,
provides a framework for establishing and reviewing quality objectives,
is communicated and understood within the organization,
is reviewed for continuing suitability
Section 5.6.1 Management Review-General, requires that the management review include the need for changes to the quality management system, including the quality policy.
What this means is that your quality policy can be any statement you want and it will pass the ISO test as long as it meets certain requirements, those requirements presented above that are specified by the standard.
Where to start
Sometimes a company may have a mission or a vision statement already established. These are actually good candidates for quality policy. In fact nothing says that a quality policy needs to be called quality policy. For example if you decide to make your mission your quality policy, an auditor may ask: where does it include a commitment to comply with requirements? As mentioned earlier, your quality policy does not have to include verbatim the requirements from the standard; however it has to reflect those. So as long as you can demonstrate that the mission includes or conveys the requirements of the ISO 9001 standard section 5.3, then that should suffice as evidence of compliance with the requirements.
