How Do ISO Standards Help Organizations Unlock Innovation And Resilience?

ISO standards prompt organizations to leverage a more innovative, resilient, and sustainable operational structure. These standards improve the management systems, making them more efficient and productive. Companies can successfully strive to meet customer and regulatory requirements through internationally agreed specifications. Moreover, ISO standards provide a universal language, thus enabling industries to expand their business and invest in international trade. This aspect is of significant importance as it helps companies compete more quickly in the global marketplace.

ISO standards are valuable tools for businesses, both large and small. They provide laid down guidelines and specifications to deliver on the performance and safety levels, ensure interoperability, and support innovation. Innovation is an essential contributor to any business’s success, as it optimizes its ability to adapt to a continuously changing world. The shifting market trends, customers’ expectations, and technology disruption make it difficult for companies to survive and thrive. ISO standard supports an organization’s innovation initiatives. Thus, it helps give rise to optimal working methods and generates new solutions to open avenues for growth, revenue, and sustainability.

The ISO standards enable the adoption of tried-and-tested frameworks that allow organizations to become more flexible and agile. Companies must choose to get certified in the proper ISO standard to improve the resiliency and innovation of their management systems. Aegis ISO certification consultancy and support help streamline the path to certification. With the right consultancy services, you can perform internal audits, identify nonconformities, remediate them, prepare documentation, and enhance your knowledge and understanding of the relevant literature. Thus, it helps prepare the organizations better for the external audit so that the Certification Body can validate the management system and certify the organization in the chosen standard.

ISO Standards: Defining the Path to Resilience

The current business landscape is highly volatile, and the internal and external parameters are continuously changing. Another significant challenge comes the growing threat of cybercrime and fraud, due to which organizations may incur an enormous financial and reputational loss. Such factors present endless challenges to an organization’s security and resilience to sustain its critical infrastructure and operational functions. Companies must have continuous, effective, and secure management systems to deal with disruption and other challenges.

Through the adoption of ISO standards companies can learn to should their responsibility and embrace a holistic, multidisciplinary approach to improve their quality, security, and resiliency. Standards play a vital role in helping break through the existing “silos” and facilitating enhanced business practices and relationships. The ISO standards assist companies in establishing healthy business relationships by improving collaboration and communication both within and between organizations.

Various sector-specific ISO standards complement business processes. The popular types of ISO standards include:

ISO 9001: Quality Management
ISO 27001: Information security Management
ISO 31000: Risk management
ISO 22008: Food Safety Management
ISO 14001: Environmental Management
ISO 639: Language codes
ISO 10002: Compliant Management System
ISO 26000: Social Responsibility
SA 8000: Social accountability
SO 13485: Medical devices
SO/IEC 17025: Testing and calibration laboratories

ISO Standards and Sustainable Innovation

For any successful business, innovation is the driving fuel. Establishing an effective innovation management system is essential for organizations to achieve business growth goals, unlock agility, and effectively respond to disruptions and challenges. Innovation is closely linked to an organization’s resilience. ISO standards help companies both innovation and resilience to understand and respond to challenging contexts, leverage creativity, and seize opportunities. It motivates and mobilizes them for organizational development to become timely and motivated.

ISO is an international body, and the standards it releases help ensure that the products/services the company manufactures are of high quality and fulfill customer and regulatory requirements. It improves both national and international trade while providing opportunities to better manage and reduce costs. The international market requires checks and balances that enable it to ensure consistency and quality across the global marketplace. ISO helps in standardizing business processes, improving their commitment to good business practices and quality. ISO standard helps businesses identify, document, and improve systems. It helps organizations to remain resilient and effectively meet challenges, to grow continuously, and flourish.

Some of the benefits of ISO certification include:

Improved processes
Increased customer retention
Reduced errors
Reduced costs
Increased team member morale and retention
Relationship management for enhanced communication between partners, vendors, and customers
Continuous improvement
Evidence-based decision-making
Process approach
Risk-based approach
Competitive edge over non-certified competitors
Boost marketability of company products/ services
Expand the market share.
Adopt sustainable work practices
Enhance profit margin
Better documentation

ISO certification costs generally depend on the following variables:

Organizations’ size and scope
Business complexity
Industry sector
Number of employees
Annual revenue
Cost of certification auditors
Gaps between the organization’s current management systems and the prescribed one
ISO consultant cost
Employees training
Cost to develop the documentation, conduct internal audits, and system review meetings
Ongoing maintenance costs
Surveillance audits
Re-certification

To Conclude:

Thus, certifying relevant ISO standards help organizations to improve their productivity and promote better stakeholder engagement, improve sustainability and circularity, and reduce rework and waste. All of these factors thus support a business’ innovation and resilience initiatives.