The reasons for decertification of ISO 9001: Financial aspects

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse the financial performance of organizations that give up their QMS (Quality Management System) according to ISO 9001 certification. Different reasons found for the cancellation of ISO 9001 certification were taken into consideration. The decrease in certification of ISO 9001 standard is, during the past few years, noticeable in many countries. Therefore, there is a need to analyze the phenomena. Methodology/Approach: The study analyses financial performance of organizations and reasons of ISO 9001 certificates cancellation based on 99 Polish organizations, which gave up certification in years 2012 and 2013. The reasons of certificate cancelation were obtained from the quality managers of studied organizations. Financial performance was estimated on the basis of the ROA indicator value. Findings: The results show that in the studied organizations, there is a big group of companies that had financial problems. There were 28.8% of organizations that did not have profits at all, and 32.9% with a financial performance, calculated according to ROA indicator value, lower than the average for the industry in which studied organizations were operating. Surprisingly, there is no evident correlation between the reasons of ISO 9001 decertification and financial performance of these organizations. Research Limitation/implication: The data cover Polish organizations that give up ISO 9001 certification, and they were obtained only from one certification body. Survey data concerning the decision of decertification cover only a twoyear period of time. Originality/Value of paper: The findings of our study might be helpful for the managers of organizations and certification bodies as well as for the researchers to describe the effectiveness of activities related to QMS implementation, certification and cancellation.