Each article in this series presents new tools for increasing return on investment, enhancing customer satisfaction, creating process excellence, and driving risk from an ISO 9001:2015-based quality management system. They will help implementers evolve quality management to overall business management. In this article we look at the clauses and subclauses of Section 7 of the standard.

Clause 7—Support

Clause 7 is an interesting montage of people, infrastructure, environmental issues, metrology, knowledge, competence, awareness, communications, and documentation. There is no cohesive theme as there is in Clause 8—Operation. So we will look at one subclause at a time.

7.1.1 General Resources

7.1.1 and excellence
It is an oversimplification to state that the organization will provide the resources to maintain and continually improve the quality management system. Clauses 4.3—Determining the scope of the quality management system, and 4.4—Quality management system and its processes both require that adequate resources be available.

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