A Study on ISO 9001 Quality Management System Certifications – Reasons Behind the Failure of ISO certified Organizations

The purpose of this study is to highlight the basic facts about the ISO certification and why considerable proportion of organizations fail even after getting certified to International system standards such as ISO 9001 Quality Management System (QMS) This study investigated the practical problems faced by the certified organizations represented by a sample group of 100 contractors from the UAE (40 Mechanical Contractors, 30 Electrical Contractors and 30 Civil contractors and a stratified random sample of 40 organizations with 1-50 staff,40 organizations with 51-100 staff and 20 organizations with more than 100 staff) and classified them through 25 variables, evaluated the effectiveness of the organizations and highlighted the major areas of system gaps. This study has revealed that there were certain system gaps in majority of the ISO 9001 QMS Certified organizations. The gaps were classified into 4 basic categories such as a) Leadership related issues b) Strategy related issues c) Quality system related issues and d) Social responsibility related issues. Out of the ten constructs tested hypothetically, nine constructs revealed a significant relationship impacting the overall system performance. Out of these 9 significant elements, only 5 have been specified in ISO 9001 Standard explicitly. With these gaps, compliance to the minimum requirements of ISO 9001 QMS is a challenge and such organizations need a solution to rectify these gaps and achieve business excellence. This study can be used as a basis to verify the effectiveness of management system in any organization and also to identify the barriers which hinder the business benefits. This study remains a basis for further research to develop and customize a model for organizations to achieve business excellence.