Understand ISO 9001:2000 Quality Management System

ISO9001:2000 is the latest revision of the ISO9001 Quality Management System. Most of the small and medium industries should be certified by now. This article is about how to prepare you for ISO9001:2000 certification

In early days of employment in the late 80's, the company I worked with has engaged a ISO consultant to help the company to get certified in ISO9002 QMS. This was the ISO series then. The consultant has organized into a working committee where I was one of the members.

The consultant provided us training in the understanding of ISO9002, followed by documentation of all our processes. A simple guideline was given to us to "document what we do" and "do what we documented". During that time, this guideline was quite straight forward. So we did and the company obtained its ISO 9002 certification.

In late 90's there was a rush for all ISO9002 QMS to convert to the new ISO9001:2000 revision. I was told that this new revision is more align to business needs as well as less emphasis on documentation. On the business needs aspect, there is the "Eight Quality Management Principles" in the new revision. They are as follows:-

1) Customer Focus
2) Leadership
3) Involvement of People
4) Process Approach
5) System approach to management
6) Continual improvement
7) Factual approach to decision making
8) Mutually beneficial supplier relationship

As a side note, these quality management principles have many similarities to the TQM principles. So, it is of the interest of leaders in ISO certified companies understand it and put an effort to extent the objective of ISO certification beyond certification purpose.

The author likes to share with you how some of the companies he worked with interpret these principles and applied them. He articulated these eight Management Principles and are written in 3 parts, namely; principles supposed to meant; how it is applied as a case; and author's view to expand its application