The 'concrete life vest' comment may have been true several releases ago, but reading the 2015 version, the standard clearly states that knowing your customers' needs is part of the standard. It is management's responsibility to do this, and registrars who do not evaluate this aspect are not being thorough.

I am not familiar with how a registrar who ignores part of the standard can be identified and corrected. Perhaps others may be able to answer this.

Our first CB auditor told us that we could be ISO 9001 certified making concrete life jackets as long as our QMS followed the requirements of the criteria. Imagine how encouraging that was to this new quality professional!

Well, good luck with your work but it seems not logical that you are using multinational and multicultural reference in the introduction text and then you constrain the survey only to US certified companies, I would suggest you use articles from US companies only and compare result for that universe since in my experience national culture has a very significant impact in the use or not use of ISO 9001, you can see it if you go to ISO survey results

ISO 9001 provides and excellent framework to achieve customer satisfaction and a sustained business performance. The results will only depend on the effectiveness of the system implementation. Complying to the minimum requirements will only ensure that the system has been implemented and real benefit can be expected only once it matures.

Once development which can be brought to Quality Management System is to rate the implementation effectiveness on a maturity scale. I would urge the community to upgrade the standard to include the maturity levels also to increase its implementation effectiveness.

This has been known for many years long before I joined the field. Now, I am not alone for sure, but I think that it is the organizations who are confused, not the quality professionals. In some instances it may stem from consultants waving around white papers that claim significance to the 9001 certification and increased customer satisfaction. In reality ISO 9001 is simply the minimum requirements for a documented Quality Management System, not an actual Quality Management System itself. Over the years people have been muddled about what ISO 9001 truly is. An effectively implemented Quality Management System built on the proven principles of quality (meeting customer stated and implied requirements) will increase customer satisfaction and thereby increase profits. This can be completely isolated from any type of certification.