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Articles - Publication Date 3.5.2001
Standards Shake-Up
Brace yourself. Revised ISO 9000 standards demand more than token participation from top management.
By David Drickhamer
At a seminar presented by quality consultant Kathy Roberts last summer, one of the attendees stood up to share his ISO story. Although his company was registered to ISO 9001, it had done the bare minimum to achieve certification. As the designated management representative, he was obviously frustrated. For the requisite management-review meetings, for example, executives of his company routinely excused themselves halfway through. They knew that their attendance would be documented in the minutes, and the company would meet its obligation in the next surveillance audit.
This type of wasteful shadow system, in which the quality-management system remains disconnected from the overall management of the company, is not what the original framers of the ISO 9000 series had in mind. But it's what prevails at a fair number of the 400,000 companies worldwide that are registered to ISO 9001, 9002, or 9003, experts say.
That disconnect could make the transition to the new ISO 9001:2000 difficult. "For those companies that unfortunately used [ISO] as a certificate on the wall, [ISO9001:2000] is going to be much more challenging because the executive team has to question how they are running their business, and take more of a hands-on approach," says Roberts, who coauthored ISO 9001:2000 Management Responsibility in a Nutshell, to be published in March by Paton Press.
New Standards Structure
On Dec. 15, 2000, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Geneva, released final versions of the revised quality-management-system standards and guidelines (ISO 9000:2000, ISO 9001:2000, ISO 9004:2000). In their structure and organization the new documents bear little resemblance to the current standards, last updated in 1994. The old version's 20-element structure has been abandoned. Specific requirements for 18 documented procedures have been reduced to six. The language is simpler; the text follows an outline rather than paragraph style; and ISO 9002 and 9003 have been eliminated.
The new standard is build on a theoretical foundation of eight principles (see Quality Management Principles) and follows a process-based approach to quality management that is intended to align the standard more with the way a business is actually run -- planning, acting, analyzing results, and making improvements -- rather than offering a random list of procedures.
"People should have quality systems that reflect, and are documented in a way that reflect, the way they really operate, rather than some arbitrary structure of 20 sections in a manual," notes Jack West, lead U.S. delegate to the ISO committee that oversees the development of the ISO 9000 family of standards.
West adds that while understanding customer requirements was in the 1994 version of the ISO 9000 series, the goal of a customer-focused organization now has been stated more explicitly with specific requirements for measuring and tracking customer satisfaction. Provisions for continuous improvement also have been added. Companies seeking registration will need to show how they use customer feedback to set clear performance objectives, and the processes they have in place to track progress toward those targets.
As different as the new standard appears, those close to its development describe the changes as more philosophical than practical. For companies that embraced the intent as well as the letter of ISO 9000:1994, meeting the conditions of the 2000 standard won't be tremendously difficult. Although it's not mandatory, most of these companies will choose to reorganize their quality manual to conform to the new document, which will involve some paperwork, and they'll have to train their employees in the new requirements. They may even have to add a few procedures.
But for companies whose management never really made a commitment, upgrading to ISO 9001: 2000 will require a lot of work, more work, perhaps
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