Quality Digest

The first two gave a lot of relevant information. Even if you found the 'long ago source' of the breakdown, it can only be irrelevant to your company.

Both respondents mentioned the cost of preparation. That's the biggie. What you get from registrars as to the registration cost is really not much.

If you have been in business for awhile, have a reasonably well defined quality management system, spend $120 and get the ISO9001:2000 standard from ASQ. (Call 800 249 1946 for that.)

Read through the standard. Take note of whatever requirement that you do not now satisfy. Estimate what it would take to satisfy (even just barely) each of those. Add them up. Convert to dollars. You know have a more reliable cost estimate than anyone could give you.

Doing anything less is setting you up for surprises, and the odds are that you would not like them.

Thank you for your inquiry. I wish there was an accurate source for
estimating the cost of ISO 9001/2/3:1994 of ISO 9001:2000 registration for a
small, medium or large organization. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any
accurate source that has broken down the cost of registration, which some
might even evaluate differently.

The Automotive Industry Action Group and the ASQ Automotive Division have
conducted several annual surveys of QS-9000 registered organizations, and the
respondents were asked among other things how much registration cost and how
much they estimated saving as a result of registration, but the figures in
those surveys were not broken out by specific costs of registration or
connected directly to the size of the organizations surveyed.

I am assuming that your company is preparing for or considering the pursuit
of ISO 9001:2000 or ISO 9001/2/3:1994 registration (some people use the term
certification, but I find the word to connote product-specific inspection and
testing) of a quality management system (QMS). However, to calculate the cost
of registration, your company needs to consider several factors:

1. How far along is the development of your organization's QMS? If your
organization is just getting started with implementation of a formal QMS to
an ISO 9000 conformance standard, it will face implementation costs that are
both external (e.g., ISO 9000 training courses for implementation team
members, internal auditors and company trainers, consulting costs if outside
experts are needed to help implement the QMS program) and internal (e.g.,
staff time spent on implementing the QMS, internal auditing, training
materials and personnel time). Some of these costs will be easy to allocate
to the QMS implementation, particularly external costs, while others will be
harder to connect to the implementation effort, including staff interruptions
due to internal and external audits.

2. Which standard is your organization planning to register to and is its QMS
already in conformance/registered to any industry or other quality system
standards or supplements? For the next three years, you have four standards
to choose from: ISO 9001:2000, which is recently published and provides
requirements for a QMS for which you set the scope; ISO 9001:1994, which
provides quality system requirements that cover everything your organization
does, including design activities; ISO 9002:1994, which includes all the
requirements in ISO 9001:1994 except design; and ISO 9003:1994, which
provides primarily inspection and testing-oriented requirements for a
nondesign-, nonproduction-oriented operation. There are also a number of
industry "standards" that are based on or similar to ISO 9001:1994 (many of
which will be updated to align with ISO 9001:2000) that an organization may
be in conformance or registered to. Depending on the standard your
organization is registering to and the level of conformance it has with that
standard's requirements before you start the registration process due to
other requirements it conforms to, the cost of implementing/updating the QMS
and of obtaining third-party registration will vary significantly. For
instance, if an organization were to choose to register now to ISO 9002:1994,
it would take less work to implement and get employees used to a quality
system that did not cover and did not include design activities; likewise,
the registrar auditing would take less time and thus cost less because there
would be less to audit (of course, the organization would need to pay the
price later when it had to update its registration to ISO 9001:2000 or lose
its investment). The closer an organization is to having a QMS in conformance
with the standard being registered against before the start of the
implementation and registration process, the less expensive the
implementation and perhaps the registration costs will be. Remember, a
cleaner, more established QMS will take less time to audit than a system
where the auditors have to spend a lot of time documenting nonconformances,
following the trails of nonconformances and working with the client to
resolve those nonconformances, which could require follow-up audits.

3. How large and how complex is the organization pursuing registration?
QS-9000 includes a table that specifies the minimum number of auditor-days
that a registrar can take to conduct a registration assessment for the
registration to be acceptable to the Big Three, and this minimum is intended
to prevent shoddy audits from taking place. However, QS-9000 does not provide
a maximum number of auditor-days that a registrar can take, because some
organizations have more complicated operations and systems than others,
making it important for the audit's length to suit the system being audited.
A good registrar auditor can also identify nonconformances and opportunities
for improvement of an organization's QMS and processes that will pay for the
cost of the auditing. Most organizations in a certain size range will
generally take roughly the same amount of time to audit, although a very lar
ge organization where every employee does exactly the same thing could take
less time to audit than a small firm where every employee follows radically
different and complex procedures that require a sophisticated documentation
and QMS. The largest expenses from a registration assessment or audit are the
number of hours/days the registrar's auditor(s) bill an organization for
conducting the audit, the travel expenses of the auditor(s) and auditor hotel
and meal expenses.

Most registrars are willing to send you an application that your organization
can fill out and send back to get a ballpark range as to what the
registration process will cost in terms of registrar fees. Keep in mind that
each registrar will have its own fee structure and they may charge a range of
prices for auditor days billed, travel expenses for auditors, desk audit
charges, follow-up audit fees, certificate of registration fees, etc.

My advice to your organization would be to check out a number of registrars
and contact 3-5 to discuss your organization and its QMS, what type of
registration you want and other factors. The registrars should be able to
send you an application form for you to fill out and send back to get a rough
estimate of the costs involved with the actual registration process. As for
implementation expenses, you need to determine how capable your organization
is of doing the implementation work itself, which I recommend for many
organizations, and how much training personnel will need to handle the
implementation of an effective and conforming QMS.

I would like to close by advising you not to cut corners on this endeavor.
The history of ISO 9001/2/3 registrations is filled with cases of companies
that didn't want to spend a lot of money on registration but had to get
registered because a customer demanded it or they thought registration would
help them get new business. Many of these companies ended up spending a good
deal of money anyway and ended up with systems that not only provided no
benefits but in some cases hindered their ability to provide consistent
product to satisfy the customer. Likewise, companies that made the commitment
to implement a QMS and get registered to improve their operations have often
been able to improve their operations and pay for the cost of registration
quickly without spending a fortune.