Starting on the certification journey? Here are a few suggestions of what to consider next.
Understand the requirements of your standards, there are many ways you can do this. Our simple checklists are a great start, or you could attend a training course. Purchasing a copy of the standard is always a good idea, these are available at iso.org. The standards are basically an agreed set of effective principles for managing various aspects of your business, you will be pleasantly surprised to find that you are likely already doing about 80% of what the standards require!
Determine the boundary of what will be included in the audit. This is the 'scope' of your certification. It is a bland and simple statement on what activities/services/locations you are going to have included in your management system.
Decide how you will resource your management system. While many elements of the standard are very intuitive and align with business as usual, there are some elements that will require some additional work. These include your internal audit, corrective action and ensuring your management review is regularly conducted. In a well designed system, these activities should be value add. Using a management system software such as CertCrowd will definitely take a lot of the guess work and manual monitoring out of the process.
Book in your stage 1 audit, take the plunge and trust your certification body to provide you an honest and detailed assessment of what elements are missing. The stage 1 audit is a gap audit against the standards, and this is where the external auditor gains an understanding of what you do as a business in order to prepare for stage 2.
