ETC measures the impact of ISO 9002 on corporate quality

In March 1995, the Energy Transportation Corporation (ETC), a major shipper of liquefied natural gas in the Far East, instituted a multiattribute evaluation procedure to measure the impact of its ISO 9002 certification. A decision analyst and three top level managers – the president, the senior vice-president of operations, and the vice-president of corporate quality – adopted a broad definition of a customer (any stakeholder) and identified all major stakeholders in ETC's operations. Next, they defined the most important value attributes in serving these stakeholders as quality indicators. For each indicator, they determined an importance weight and assessed the level of improvement since the ISO 9002 initiative began in early 1993. A final aggregation showed that ETC's efforts concerning ISO 9002 had improved corporate quality by about 10 percent in the judgement of the managers. ETC used the study to better prioritize its use of available resources for continuous improvement projects.