Business is very much a team sport. Some people are managers, some are players, and some are support - but they all have to do their jobs if the team expects to win.A contract is entered into by two parties when they want to specify the responsibilities of each to the other. The contract details what each party has agreed to do. If you say to your neighbor "I will sell my car to you if you give me $200" you have entered into a contract. The other party enters into the contract if they accept your offer. Until they accept or reject your offer, you are legally bound by your offer to sell your car. A contract doesn't have to be written down and signed to be binding (but, if not, it makes a difference whether or not you have witnesses).Osada, The 5S's: Five Keys to a Total Quality Environment, Asian Productivity Organization, 1993
Contract \kan-,trakt\ n 1: a binding agreementSection 4.3 of the ISO 9001 standard is concerned with Contracts. A supplier such as our company enters into a contract when it agrees to do some work for someone else. That someone else is a customer. We enter into a contract when we agree to build and deliver a system or when we agree to sell an existing system at a specified price. Consequently, the ISO 9001 requirement is that we satisfy our customer by satisfying the requirements specified in the contract.
The ISO 9001 standard is a contract that we enter into when we claim that we are an ISO 9000 compliant company. Section 4.3 stipulates our contractual obligations to our customers as an ISO 9000 compliant organization.
4.3 Contract Review 4.3.1 General
The supplier shall establish and maintain documented procedures for contract review and for the coordination of these activities.
This requirement of ISO 9001 is repeated in similar form in every section of the standard. An ISO 9001 compliant company establishes and maintains documented procedures for every thing that affects the quality of the products or services that that company supplies.
These procedures are established because they are necessary. A company may have accumulated the information embodied in these procedures at significant cost over years of trial and error. Failure to follow the appropriate procedures is tantamount to forgetting what you have learned.
These procedures are documented so they may be followed, not only by the people whose responsibility it is, but also by replacements in an emergency or other situation. They are documented to augment fallible human memory. They are documented so that important information about how we do business is communicated to those who need to know it.
Finally, they are documented so that the procedures can be studied and improved.
As intelligent beings we are not expected to follow directions slavishly. We are expected to exercise our judgment. This is not inconsistent with having documented procedures. The role of the procedures is that of a baseline. They tell us what is expected by the affected individuals. They should not tell us how to dot our i's and cross our t's.
A procedure is a contract that we enter into when we agree to be responsible for the area it covers. When we can not meet the requirements of the contract, we have to re-negotiate the contract with whomever is also a party to it. When we are unable to meet some requirement spelled out in a procedure, this un-met requirement provides us with information we can use to avoid the costs that would otherwise be incurred. We can communicate with the affected individuals. We can find another, alternative means of solving the problem.
In a civilized society, we all depend on each other.These concepts apply to individuals in an organization who do not deal with outside customers. We perform our duties in support of other groups in the expectation of mutual benefit from the totality of our efforts. While we may not deal with customers directly, we have internal customers who depend upon our living up to the contracts that we make with them. These contracts may not be legal documents. However, we should consider them to be just as binding upon us.Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson