Economical aspects of ISO 9000 certification in Japanese companies

In this paper, we consider economical aspects of ISO 9000 certification in Japanese companies based on estimation of expenses and profits on certifications. This paper, first, describes a model which expresses relationship among activities for certification, expenses for certification, profits brought by certification and financial indices such as sales, selling, general and administration in profit and loss statements and so on. After the model description, a case study is conducted in a company in order to obtain expenses for ISO 9000 certification based on the model. We conduct a questionnaire survey, where the questionnaire was sent to Japanese manufacturing companies for the generalization of the estimated expenses in the case study. The responses on the questionnaire derive an average expense for certification among the companies. The following part considers estimation of both expenses and profits of certification by the data analysis on the items in profit and loss statements. Specifically, time series analysis, graphical modeling and covariance structure analysis are applied to obtain both expenses and profits. Finally, the above results are summarized by comparison of the explored expenses and profits.