The problem of not having an agreed "purpose" is that people then use it anyway they wish. Those who promote it can assign all kinds of curative powers to it in the search of profit. I would be much happier if the document were treated as a book on quality assurance. Its purpose would be to "provide quality assurance professionals with a guide of requirements and procedures to assist them in establishing programs in their organization".

There is a precedent for the proper use of all the various ISO 9000 versions and additions that have been produced. The Accountants have what they call the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Companies adopt these procedures and polices as the way they handle accounting. The purpose here is to have a standard way of measuring, controlling, and reporting about financial status. However they do not confuse this with Financial Management. That has to do with the strategy and decisions about investment, compensation and other factors of finance. Also the Accountants do not represent GAAP as being a factor in producing profitability for the organisation.

The way ISO is presented should be more in line with GAAP. We can call it Generally Accepted Quality Assurance Principles (GAQAP). This is my major quarrel with ISO 9000 and its brethren. But this article is about ISO 9001:2000. I have a few problems with the document and will suggest ways to overcome them later in the article. My concerns are:

 

1. The key ingredient is requiring that organizations install and maintain a quality management system. But such a system is not defined or described. This is like telling someone they need to eat a "proper diet" and then requiring that they figure out just what that is.

 

2. There are many platitudes that are not doable or measurable, such as:

- "The documentation of an organization’s quality management system should be defined in a manner that is appropriate to its unique activities".

- "Top management shall demonstrate its commitment to creating and maintaining awareness of the importance to fulfil customers’ requirements"

- "The organization shall determine and provide in a timely manner, the resources needed to establish and maintain the quality management system".

 

3. There are many cliches, like "customer requirements". Organizations make their own requirements based on what it takes to run the company and what they see as the customer’s needs. Only Defense Departments send along a list of requirements.

 

4. The document is about two thirds too long if the intention is for senior management to read it. It is probably OK for the professionals but most of it reads like the by-laws for a home-owners association.

 

5. There is no requirement to calculate the price of nonconformance. This is the most important aspect of quality management in the eyes of the leadership.

Regardless, the specification does have an air of authority about it, which a diligent Quality Manager can use to build an operation. However it will be hard to get management to take it seriously unless they are first educated to understand how it fits into their operational process. Nothing can be laid on people successfully unless they have been prepared to receive and understand it. That is why the military insists on training people before they are assigned to duty; that is why physicians have to go to graduate school before they can treat patients; that is why employees have an orientation process before they can do any work. They are not going to understand or utilize this specification unless it is placed in the context of an overall management philosophy. Everyone I ask: "Why are you doing ISO?" replies that the customers require it. I don’t hear much about doing it in order to improve the organization’s integrity. Either they do not really understand it or the whole idea of having Generally Accepted Quality Assurance Practices (GAQAP) is misplaced.

Let me explain why I think this way and what I feel can be done to obtain the maximum value from ISO 2001:2000. It could be the foundation of a new level of achievement in quality management. It could also amount to nothing if management does not take it seriously.

I am writing from the real-world view of one who was an on-line quality professional beginning in 1953 as an assembly line inspector/tester. I served as a quality engineer; reliability engineer; group engineer; quality manager; and then as corporate vice-president of ITT. I joined this $20 billion dollar revenue company with 500 manufacturing and service units in 46 countries in 1965. Since 1979 I have been the founder and Chief Executive of an organization teaching quality management philosophy and practice to thousands of companies worldwide. What we teach is what I created and wrote about through those years of experience where I was required to create a corporate culture in which the integrity of the products and services would be a routine achievement.

During my practitioner years the biggest problem always was the feeling of management, supported by conventional quality wisdom, that quality could be achieved by a systematic approach. It was thought that if only the Quality Department could put one together from all the published material, then quality would come about. This false hope led to the development, by the U.S. Department of Defense of Mil Q 5923 ("The control of nonconforming material"), and Mil Q 9858 which was a Quality Assurance specification. These were embellished by system specification created by large corporations, which they then imposed on their suppliers. All of these were carefully audited and certified by the resident Quality practitioners. I always found them to require activity well below what we were doing anyway so there was no problem in meeting the auditing sessions.

The problems with these information packages were two: first it was assumed that the Quality Department was responsible for making all those things happen; and second there was nothing that said work had to be done correctly. The world of Acceptable Quality Levels was built into them. The result of all this was that product and service quality in the companies who lived to these documents was unreliable. These systems were only tolerable where there was little competition and where the customers were compliant. All this led to the US and Europe having large problems with Quality in the 1970s. The US lost its home electronics industry and a third of the automobile business before they got the right message.

In my 14 years at ITT (1965-1979) I had the opportunity to install a quality education capability that helped management of all levels worldwide have a clear understanding of quality. They understood their personal role in bringing it about. Quality professionals world wide inside ITT were provided with the materials and instruction to get the educational information installed in everyone’s minds. They were taught how to lead their Unit into defect prevention. It became the corporate philosophy, understood and practiced by management and employees at all levels. The corporate Quality Policy stated:

"WE WILL DELIVER DEFECT FREE PRODUCTS

AND SERVICES TO OUR CUSTOMERS AND CO-WORKERS, ON TIME".

We had the philosophical base identified as what I called "The Absolutes of Quality Management". This later formed the base of the Quality College.

 

1. Quality is defined as conformance to requirements. (I was pleased that ISO 9000 used this).

 

2. Quality comes from prevention. (This is contained in 9001:2000).

 

3. Quality has a performance standard of Zero Defects.

 

4. Quality is measured by the Price of Non-conformance (PONC).