ISO 9001 Standard and Organization's Performance: A Literature Review

Abstract

Nowadays, ISO 9001 has been adopted by different organizations in all over the world. This standard was first introduced in 1978 by International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Several empirical studies revealed the importance of this quality management tool for improving continuously performance within the organizations, in order to satisfy customer's needs and promote competitiveness in the market. Although ISO 9001 standard has shown its usefulness to the companies from different sectors, but there is no consensus among practitioners and scholars whether ISO 9001 considerably enables to improve firms' performance. Thus, this study was performed to review the findings of the empirical studies, which tested the hypothesized relationship between ISO 9001 standard and the different perspectives of organization's performance, in order to present an aggregate overview of the role of ISO standard in improving performance in the organizations from different sectors. So, the research was designed to identify, select, and review the empirical studies that were relevant to the objectives of the research, and likewise published between 2002 and 2017. From literature review, the only 19 empirical studies selected that were relevant and fitted to the criteria of the study with the aim of obtaining the results and conclusions. Finally, the analysis of the results of the empirical studies uncovered that ISO 9001 significantly affected internal business process, while this standard was not correlated with the indicators of innovation and learning perspective at significant level. Furthermore, the systematic review of the existing literature provided enough evidence that the effectiveness of ISO 9001 on customer's results and financial performance were unclear and contradictory.

Measuring the Impact of ISO 9001 on Employee and Customer Related Company Performance

“…The results of the study reveal that ISO 9001 certification positively impacts customer satisfaction, customer retention, market share, employee productivity and employee satisfaction (similar results were reached by Gotzamani, 2010;Karapetrovic, Casadesus and Saizarbitoria, 2010;Nabavi, Azizi and Faezipour, 2014;Melão and Guia, 2015;Valmohammadi and Kalantari, 2015;-bekele and Zewedie, 2017;Husseini et al, 2018;Kakouris and Sfakianaki, 2018;Othman, 2019;Sweis et al, 2019), but there is no evidence of its impact on employee retention. Some of the authors finding positive impact of ISO 9001 on employee satisfaction (Rodríguez-Antón and Alonso-Almeida, 2011; Sakka, 2013;Bekele and Zewedie, 2017;Neyestani and Juanzon, 2017;Sweiss et al, 2019) explain that such effect comes from improved education, communication, empowerment, team work, clear quality goals, continuous improvement and improved working conditions, especially regarding safety and health at work. Positive impact of certification on customer-related company performance supports the assumption that ISO 9001 certificate helps companies to obtain legitimacy in their institutional environment, improve image and overcome trade barriers.…”

Evolution of management system certification after “Big Revision”

“…ISO 9001 plays an important role by supply chains requirements specification to your supplier and customers and requirement control (Neyestani & Juanzon, 2017). The ISO 9001 provides a set of requirements that allows significant confidence that the supplier will steadily deliver goods and services that meet the requirements and expectations of the customer and in accordance with the applicable regulations.…”

Quality Costing Technique: An Appropriate Financial Indicator for Reducing Costs and Improving Quality in the Organizations

“…With the turn of the new millennium, global competition has increased [13]. This competitive pressure motivates the companies' management to verify their "business strategies and practices.…”

“…Total quality management (TQM) is a set of opinions and ideas that widely called "management philosophy" [10], which "emphasizes on non-stop quality improvement within all aspects of the organizations" [9, p. 1581]. Oakland [14] stated Total quality management (TQM) has different aspects, one of its main dimension is its tools, such as quality costing method, benchmarking, 7 old quality tools, and even ISO 9000 [13]. However, the quality of the products and services should be measurable in order to quantify the benefits of TQM implementation has been achieved by firm.…”