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Using ISO 9001 or ISO 14001 to Gain a Competitive Advantage Spencer Hutchens Jr. The Competitive Advantage of International Standards 1 Introduction To be competitive on both a national and a global basis, organizations must adopt a forward-thinking approach in developing their management strategies. One of the foundations of a successful strategy is the management system. A management system may be well-defined and documented, or consist merely of a shared understanding of how things are done – but either way, the management system defines how work is done, the desired outcomes, and the controls imposed to ensure those outcomes. Management system standards such as ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 help an organization to better control its processes. The products and services that are the outcomes of these processes are only indirect concerns of the standards. “ISO 9001 doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to make a good product — only that you’ve got a management system in place that aims to make a good product,” said Robert King, president of the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board (ANAB).1 ISO 9001 provides guidance for quality management — what an organization does to fulfill requirements and ensure customer satisfaction, while continuously improving the effectiveness of its operations. ISO 14001 is for environmental management — what an organization does to minimize its effect on the environment. Conformance with these standards is voluntary: an organization can implement an ISO 9001- or ISO 14001-based management system solely for the internal benefits of increased effectiveness and operational efficiency. In the years since ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 were published, many organizations have followed the models of these standards in designing their own management systems. However, many of those management systems are purely reactive — that is,