ISO 9000:2000 Key Changes
The major reasons for the year 2000 revisions of the standards include:
- Emphasizing
the need to monitor customer satisfaction,
- Meeting
the need for more user-friendly documents,
- Assuring
consistency between quality management system requirements
and guidelines,
- Promoting the use of generic quality management principles by organizations, and enhancement of their compatibility with ISO 14001.
Extensive surveys have been performed on a worldwide basis to understand the needs of all users of the quality management system standards. The new revisions take into account previous experience with quality management system standards (1987 and 1994 editions) and emerging insights into generic management systems. They result in a closer alignment of quality management systems with the needs of organizations to better reflect the way organizations run their business activities. ISO's rules of procedure (the ISO/IEC Directives) also specify that standards be periodically revised to ensure that those standards are current and satisfy the needs of the global community.
The new requirements and the format of the ISO 9001:2000 standard communicate the systems nature of the standard. The emphasis on planning and top management involvement establishes it as a true management system. Product and service quality are included, but they are not the only aspect of the customer's experience. Understanding and improving the customers' perception of how well you meet their requirements is a requirement of the new standard. This must be established at the top levels of management and communicated throughout the whole organization.
In addition to new requirements, the standard itself was simplified by merging 9001, 9002, and 9003 into a single 9001 standard. Organizations will no longer have to choose which standard to certify to now that all will certify to a single standard - 9001:2000.
Some areas were revised or updated in order to bring them in line with changes that have occurred in other areas of the standard.
- ISO 9001:1994, ISO 9002:1994 and ISO 9003:1994 were merged into a single ISO 9001:2000 standard.
- ISO 8402 and part of ISO 9000-1 were combined into a new ISO 9000:2000 standard.
- ISO 9004-1 was revised into a new ISO 9004:2000 standard.
- ISO 10011 (Parts 1, 2 and 3) were combined with ISO 14010, ISO 14011 and ISO 14012 into a new guideline standard for quality and environmental management system auditing (to be numbered ISO 19011).
Next: What are the ISO 9000:2000 Standards?
