When you are vetting vendors in your manufacturing process ask if they are ISO certified. ISO certification is the centerpiece for global proprietary, commercial and industrial standards. An ISO certified company has gone through a rigorous and extensive process involving applications, documentation, inventory, and on-site audits for standards in their specific area of expertise. This quality management system is the largest in the world. ISO companies have raised their standards to another level of accountability in relation to their products and services.
Corporate Accountability & Responsibility
ISO certified companies have taken their company to the next level because they want to make sure their products meet customer requirements in a global market. ISO stands for the International Organization for Standardization which sets standards for global proprietary, industrial and commercial standards. Founded in 1947 the governing body is made up of representatives from a diverse platform of national standards organizations.
U.S. companies must apply and meet the qualifications of the National Institute of Standards and Technology a non-regulatory agency of the Department of Commerce. It promotes innovation and industrial competitiveness. ISO 9001:2015 is the standard for quality control and documentation.
Why Should I Care If a Vendor is ISO Certified?
ISO is a quality control system that adheres to global standards and helps customers as well as suppliers and vendors. Let’s say your company manufactures widgets. One day your quality control team notices the ink on a batch of packaged widgets is smearing, or fading. You contact your packaging supplier and they can walk back the packaging printing process through a series of controls and documentation until they locate the source of the issue. It could be an ink supplier, a machine that is worn and needs repair, or a bad batch of paper from the vendor supplying the packaging to be printed. ISO ensures customer satisfaction and protects vendors’ costly mistakes, breakdowns, or supplier failures. This enables the vendor to quickly identify any issue, correct the problem for the customer, and resume production with confidence. Without ISO it’s a crapshoot and everything can come to a grinding halt while the vendor plays Sherlock Holmes trying to figure out the source of the problem.
Meeting ISO standards in industry and manufacturing is an important certification that lets customers know you have passed rigorous audits by independent contractors licensed by ISO to audit and issue certifications. The certification opens the door if companies require it for their suppliers and it demonstrates a vendor’s ability to operate at the same level as larger ones.
At Century Printing and Packaging we recently passed a two-day audit and our ISO certification has been renewed for another 3 years. We have been answering the call for high-quality and high-performance labels across a diverse platform of industries like craft breweries, Nutraceuticals, CBD products, and newspapers. We can accommodate flexo, digital, flexible packaging, and many other product applications.
Ben Waldrop
President
Greer, SC 29651
800.344.7509
