The date for businesses to implement the upgrades is just around the corner. Find out what’s required.

December 15, 2003 has been set by the International Organization for Standardization as the compliance date for their standards’ new revisions. The ISO 9001:2000 standards, which were first introduced in December of 2000, place a greater emphasis on customer satisfaction, the involvement of higher tiers of management, and an increase of overall long-term improvement. This upgrade effectively replaces the earlier ISO 9001:1994, as well as ISO 9002:1994 and ISO 9003:1994.

The new standards also demand that the quality-management systems (QMS) as outlined in ISO 9004:2000 be improved upon and expanded to cover all aspects of customer satisfaction and customer communication. Specifically, the new standards direct managers to take steps to identify customer needs and create requirements that address those needs. Managers must also show they are actively seeking to improve customer satisfaction. They need to make employees aware of the importance of customer satisfaction, set up a means of increasing communication with customers and develop a system for implementing the information that they gather. In addition, managers are asked to set quality objectives for themselves, develop schedules to review those objectives and perform data analysis to determine the QMS’s success. Not surprisingly, the areas that are likely to absorb the brunt of these changes are the marketing, billing, and sales departments, and, of course, customer service.

Some new requirements have been added with the intent of creating quality objectives and planning the steps needed to reach these objectives, establishing a framework for developing an objective review system and ensuring management’s commitment to this review.

Companies seeking compliance with the new standards should be warned that the changes have not been grouped separately in any clause or special section. Rather they are interwoven throughout each section of the ISO document and require reading the standards through comprehensively. On the bright side, the documentation requirements that the revisions outline are easier to implement, trimming the 1994 standard’s requirement of 15 documented procedures down to an easier to manage total of 6. In addition, a number of Web-based software tools are currently available that are intended to help compliant companies upgrade to the higher standards. Companies seeking additional information on the standards are directed to contact the American Society for Quality or the International Organization for Standardization at their respective web sites.

American Society for Quality
http://www.asq.org

International Organization for Standardization
http://www.iso.org

Source: New ISO 9000 Standards Raise the Bar
Mike Delpha
Industrial Maintenance & Plant Operation, March 2002
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