Yes, you can definitely implement the standard without consultant's help, the best way to do it is to approach the implementation as a project and prevent missing anything out. It would be good to have a copy of the standard, but there is a lot of free material on our website that can help you do it without actual copy of the standard.
In order to get the ISO 9001 certificate, you need first to implement the ISO 9001 standard. This means that you need to create all necessary documentation and make your processes compliant with the requirements of the standard.
Our documentation templates are applicable to any kind of organization including the public department. Since they are 80% filled in, you only need to write in some small adjustments to make them fit to your organization.
Together with documentation toolkit you get one hour online meeting with an expert and you can ask unlimited number of questions via email. You can also send us some of your documents for a review to make sure that your documentation is compliant with the standard.
Before you apply for registration you must implement the standard, which means you need to create necessary documentation and start following new procedures.
Once you implemented the standard (this includes performing internal audit and management review) you can call the certification body to conduct certification audit.
An engineering change request (ECR) form is used to describe a suggested enhancement or problem with a product. A change request originates from customer complaints, field failures, non-conforming materials, audits, product enhancement ideas and other various sources.
An engineering change order (ECO) is a documentation packet that outlines the proposed change, lists the product or part(s) that would be affected and requests review and approval from the individuals who would be impacted or charged with implementing the change.
The simplified translation to QMS language would be that ECR is non-conformance record and ECO is corrective action record related to design and development process.
The bot h can be considered as a part of the process of continual improvement and they can be included in quality objectives. The objectives you stated "reduce minimum cycle time for ECO by 3 days and reduce ECR percentage by 1" are very good objectives to start with.
What questions to expect during certification audit
The certification body will try to determine whether your organization is compliant with the standard or not. They will ask you questions about every requirement of the standard.
It is best to start corrective action immediately. Conducting corrective action includes determining the root cause of nonconformity and taking action to prevent non-conformance from recurring.
The whole corrective action process can take some time, an you need to determine the time frame for investigating and removing non-conformance, but you should initiate the corrective action as soon as possible.
Since you have implemented the ISO 27001, I suggest you to conduct the GAP analysis first since there are a lot of common requirements of both standards. Once you determine what ISO 9001 requirements you already met, you can create your project plan and met the remaining requirements.
It is best to ask your certification body, some certification bodies allow certification audit to be performed immediately and some require 3 or more months to pass before certification audit. But it is important that you complete the whole QMS cycle which means you need to perform internal audit and management review in order to be able to pass the certification.
First you must ask your certification body whether they will audit your organization according to ISO 9001:2008 or ISO 9001:2015.
If the certification body will conduct re-certification according to ISO 9001:2008, then you don't need to do much more compared with previous surveillance audits. You need to make sure that internal audit is conducted, as well as management review. Check the status of corrective and preventive actions, see if there were any recommendations or non-conformities identified during previous surveillance audit and make sure that they are removed.
If the re-certification will be conducted according to ISO 9001:2015, you will have to make a transition to a new version and there will be some significant changes.
My suggestion is, if they plan to re-certify your organization according to ISO 9001:2015 to reschedule your certi fication to August 2015, in this way they will have to re-certify you against ISO 9001:2008 and you will have enough time to make transition in following years. But if you decide to do re-certification against ISO 9001:2015, you will have our full support. We are planing to launch the free webinar that will explain how to make a transition to a new version of standard and our new documentation toolkit will be launched as soon as final draft of the standard is released. So, either way, you can accomplish your re-certification.