Certification: occasion of innovation, development and competitiveness for the business

Abstract. The certification – of product, of management system, of personnel – is an aim that an enterprise, provided of good “management skills”, may achieve after programming and carrying out a serious and binding internal process of innovation both of organizing and technological peculiarity. It represents an important management incentive for enterprises, that in this way may impose and distinguish themselves among others in a more and more competitive global market, where customer assurance and satisfaction represent the principal aims to be pursued. In this analysis we propose to examine the benefits enterprises may achieve implementing (and eventually certifying) their own management system. Anyway, we cannot ignore the shades that are going to delineate about the “assurance” of certification that, from a voluntary action, is at last considered a requirement that enterprises cannot give up, an aim to achieve in any case and in a short time. Very often we do not consider its “quality”, depending also on the not always uniform behaviour of some certifying organisms. The certifying activity, that should essentially be a technical activity, might change, in this case, into a prevalently commercial and marketing activity for enterprises.