Empirical Evidences about ISO 9001 and ISO 9004 in Italian Companies

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the experience of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001 certified companies, examining their motivations to introduce the standard and their perceived benefits and barriers. In parallel, the research investigated the knowledge and perception of ISO 9004 guideline, analyzing if it could give an added value to certified companies. Design/methodology/approach: A questionnaire was proposed by e-mail to 2,581 Italian ISO 9001 certified companies from January 18 to March 31, 2016;522 companies participated to the survey. Findings: Companies of different size have been driven by different motivations to certification, reaching different types of benefits, while both large and small ones perceived the greater bureaucratization as an obstacle. The ISO 9004 standard is little known and applied among Italian companies, but the ones which adopted it benefited from it. Research limitations/implications: A limitation may be derived from the fact that the sample was composed only of Italian companies, although this effect was to understand perceptions and trends of these international standards in the Italian reality. Practical implications: Analyzing perceived advantages and disadvantages of ISO 9001 and 9004 could be crucial for managers to understand if their joint use is the right strategy to gain competitiveness in the reference markets. Originality/value: Compared to previous studies in which ISO 9001 was evaluated as a stand-alone standard, the research made a comparative evaluation with ISO 9004, as ISO considers them to be "consistent pair of standards," covering the literature gap about the effectiveness of the joint use of them.