ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management System: Release of products and services (8.6)

Speak Mandarin Campaign and NDP organisers apologise for linguistic errors

A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on July 12, 2017, with the headline 'Language gaffes: Two event organisers say sorry'.

One embarrassing mistake was in the use of the wrong Chinese character in a rostrum signIn a gaffe at Monday's launch of the Speak Mandarin Campaign, instead of using the Chinese character for "read", the character for "to show disrespect" was used on a sign that featured prominently.

In the NDP case, there were typographical errors in the Tamil translation of the theme #OneNationTogether, printed on the NDP publicity pamphlets given to Primary 5 pupils from 162 schools before they attended the NDP's National Education (NE) shows. The translation was supposed to read as "Let's come together as one nation". But in that translation, some letters were in the wrong places, while others were missing, making the words unintelligible.

These are but real examples of quality management system lapses causing embarrassments to the organizers. Generally, people cannot accept such lapses and anyone concerns about quality management processes can learn from such blunders.

One way to prevent such error is to adopt a quality management system like ISO 9001:2015 and implement processes to meet the standard’s requirements. One of the requirement, Clause 8.6 Release of products and services states precisely:

“The organization shall implement planned arrangements, at appropriate stages, to verify that the product and services requirements have been met.

The release of products and services to the customer shall not proceed until the planned arrangements have been satisfactorily completed, unless otherwise approved by a relevant authority and, as applicable, by the customer.”

The organization shall retain documented information on the release of products and services.”

In this context, the artwork supplier and providers would need to define their processes to deliver the final products. Normally the final artworks must go through internal and external checks and approvals before launching the printing and manufacturing processes to produce the final products. Records are maintained to include evidence of verification for conformity with acceptance criteria and traceable to the person(s) authorizing the release of the product. When a robust quality management system is effectively implemented, sources of error could easily be spotted, traced and fixed prior to delivery of the final product to the customer.  

Where all planned verification and checks have been carried out at various steps and yet nobody has spotted such errors, the only aspect for investigation to such lapses falls on the competency of personnel performing such verifications and checks. When personnel are not effectively trained to be competent to perform their roles and duties, lapses would occur. This competency aspect stipulated as another requirement in the ISO 9001:2015 Standard.

Clause 7.2 Competence in the ISO 9001:2015 Standard is an important element in the quality management system. It’s beneficial to read the content and understand its requirements for effective quality control.