Continual Improvement

The 9001:2000 standard now contains section 8.5.1 requiring that companies continually improve the effectiveness of their quality systems. Note that it does not say, “improve your product”! We find that auditors have been nudging us towards this concept for several years, although there is no specific requirement in the 1994 standard to do so.

Revision Control

The 9001:2000 standard contains basically 5 large sections, replacing the 20 elements of the 9001:1994 system. This makes revision control more difficult that before. Rather than using only 5 separate revision control sections, corresponding to the 5 major sections, we found it more convenient to use 31 revision control sections, corresponding to logical divisions among the minor sections. For example, we have broken out non-conformances and internal audit into their own sections as they were under our 1994 system. So much for the 9001:2000 standard being simpler!

Overall

On the plus side, the wording is more friendly to the service industry compared to the 1994 version, which was clearly aimed at manufacturers. In fact, in the wording of the standard, “product” is interchangeable with “service”. Any claimed reductions in paperwork or effort though are not obvious to this writer. In fact, some of the new sections require considerable extra work. While some of the sections of your present 1994 version system can be directly used to meet the 2000 standard, others will need to be written from scratch. In particular, we found the new section 8.0: Measurement, Analysis and Improvement required a major rewrite. The new standard is clearly more customer focused that the 1994 version. In principle, this is a good thing, but will probably present the most difficult challenges in meeting the requirements of the 9001:2000 version.

Page 1 2