4 Simple Steps to Upgrade your ISO Management Systems Certification
On a regular basis, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) UPDATES its more than twenty thousand (20,000) standards, covering everything from manufactured products and technology to food safety, agriculture, and healthcare. This requires companies updating their processes to the requirements of the new update published by the body. An example is, upgrading or transiting from ISO 22000:2005 to ISO 22000:2018 food safety management systems.
For the transition process, some steps must be followed in order to upgrade the existing management system that your organization is certified to to the new version of a standard. To do that, the following simple sequence of steps are recommended:
Analyze the Organization's Context
The organization need to analyze its interested parties (i.e. those individuals, organizations or group that can influence or be influenced by your organization’s processes or activities). This includes analyzing the internal and external issues that might influence an organization’s management system and their attending risks & opportunities. Next, you check how these risks and opportunities can be managed with the help of the management system.
Scope of the Management Systems
Reflect, recognize the scope of the management system while reflecting what it is bound to deliver.
Utilize the data and information from the context analysis to institute the organization’s processes, risk evaluation & assessment and develop the key performance indicators (KPIs) for the organization’s activities related to the management system under consideration.
Transition Plan and Methodology
If you are presently implementing for example, ISO 22000:2005, then prior effective implementation will be helpful for transition to ISO 22000:2018. Multiple requirements of some management system standards are the equivalent or analogous e.g. ISO 9001, ISO 45001. But the clauses are stated in a different order and have slightly different terminologies.
Existing users of an outdated standard should take note of the following suggestions for effective upgrade to a new requirements. You need to:
- Consider getting trained on the new version of the standard your organization intend upgrading to. This may include implementation and internal auditor training by competent training organization.
- Get a copy of the standard from ISO Store
- Examine the changes in the standard.
- Conduct a gap analysis against the version you intend to upgrade to versus the system your organization is currently certified to.
- Plan and apply actions to fulfil highlighted gaps in their study.
- Update your documentation to reflect the new requirements of the standard.
- Implement the changes already captured in your documentation to your processes.
- Conduct an internal audit of your entire system covered by your management system against the requirements of the standard at some defined interval(s).
- Implement actions to correct any nonconformance captured during the audit.
- And then, arrange with your certification body to conduct certification audit.
Click here for tools and courses on how to do it yourself!
About the Author
Adebayo is a thought leader in continuous process improvement and manufacturing excellence. He is a Certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt (CSSMBB), Digital Manufacturing Professional and Management Systems Lead Auditor (ISO 9001, 45001 & ISO 22000) with strong experience leading various continuous improvement initiative in top manufacturing organizations.
You can reach him here.
