The Chartered Quality Institute

Qualityworld

The future is bright

With changes due to ISO 9001 next year and a new range of quality management standards being developed and issued, the International Organisation for Standardization's secretary general, Alan Bryden, describes the outlook for international standards

Most quality professionals will immediately associate ISO with ISO 9001, which has become the world's benchmark standard for quality management systems. They will also know that ISO is the originator of ISO 14001, the standard for environmental management systems and that in recent years ISO has published new management system standards for food safety, supply chain security and information secuity. But what else does the organisation have planned for the future of quality?

ISO's work programme ranges from standards for traditional activities, such as agriculture and construction, through mechanical engineering, manufacturing and distribution, to transport, medical devices, information and communication technologies, new areas such as nanotechnologies and standards for good management practice and for services.

The topicality of ISO and its standards has never been greater. The 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos attracted more than 1,000 industry and economic leaders, joined by key players from political, academic and societal institutions, providing evidence of the global relevance of ISO's standards.

For example, participants agreed that climate change constitutes by far the greatest threat to the world economy. The ISO 14064 and ISO 14065 standards to support greenhouse gas accounting and verification, and emissions trading, are two of the newest examples of practical tools developed by ISO to help the international community to achieve sustainable development.

As a whole, ISO's standards offer a set of tools for tackling the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, environmental and societal.

Info on ISO

ISO launched an improved version of its website www.iso.org at the end of August 2007. Here are some useful areas:

Quality standards

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the ISO 9000 series, a year after the tenth anniversary of the ISO 14000 series. ISO 9001 is now firmly established as the globally accepted standard for providing assurance about the quality of goods and services in supplier-customer relations.

Work is currently in progress on the new edition of ISO 9001, due to be published in October 2008, with the aim of enhancing the clarity of ISO 9001 and its compatibility with ISO 14001. Changes are only being introduced where there are clear benefits in order to limit the impact on current users of the standard.

At the same time, ISO 9004 is being revised to ensure an improved fit with ISO 9001 so that both standards might be applied within the same quality management system. ISO 9004 provides guidelines for achieving performance improvements and through its current revision, ISO/TC 176, is looking at how an organisation can use the philosophy of quality management to achieve sustained success, to the benefit of its stakeholders and customers. The new standard is due to be published in August 2009.

The new edition of ISO 14001, issued in 2004, aimed to improve the standard's alignment with ISO 9001 and its clarity to enable consistent global application. And it is still proving to be equally globally relevant. Up to the end of December 2005, at least 111,162 ISO 14001 certificates (1996 and 2004 versions consolidated) had been issued in 138 countries and economies, an increase of 24 per cent over 2004.

A great deal of effort has been expended, in coordination with the developers of ISO's new management system standards, to achieve compatibility between them and ISO 9001. This will ensure that an organisation that wishes to use the standards in conjunction with ISO 9001 can easily do so. One of the critical activities for the future is to further improve the alignment of ISO 9001 with standards from other fields, to make it easier for organisations to use them in an integrated manner to meet their business needs.

In addition to ISO 9001 itself, a number of standards have emerged in recent years that use quality management as their core and add sector-specific requirements.

  • AS 9000 (aerospace)
  • ISO/TS 16949 (automotive)
  • ISO/TS 29001 (petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries)
  • ISO 13485 (medical devices)
  • TL 9000 (telecommunications)
  • ISO 22000 (food safety)
  • ISO/PAS 28000 (security)
  • ISO/IEC 27001 (information security)

As the above overview suggests, ISO 9001, like ISO 14001, is now thoroughly integrated with the global economy. Naturally, it is therefore important to think hard about their future development and that of management system standards in general. This reflection is currently taking place within the strategic advisory group on management system standards established by ISO's technical management board.

Although certification is not a requirement of any of the ISO management system standards, and although ISO itself does not carry out certification, it is extremely widespread and the credibility of certification is therefore important to the reputation of both standards and the ISO. ISO looks to the conformity assessment community and its leading bodies, in particular the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) to police certification effectively.

Regarding certification, ISO has cooperated with the conformity assessment community to develop the new ISO/IEC 17021, which places rigorous requirements for competence and impartiality on the bodies that carry out certification to management system standards, such as ISO 9001 and ISO 14001. ISO/IEC 17021 was designed to increase confidence in management system certification. It is also designed to be compatible with a further expansion of management system certification, not only in relation to ISO 9001and ISO 14001, but also to new management standards, eg ISO 22001. ISO has also signed a memorandum of understanding with IAF and International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC) to formalise our joint cooperation in this area.

New global challenges

An area in which ISO is increasingly involved is the challenge of safety and security. ISO has published standards on IT security management (ISO 27001), food safety management (ISO 22000 series), supply chain security (ISO 28000 series) and ISO's new technical committee, ISO/TC 223 'Societal security', is addressing issues such as business continuity management and emergency preparedness.

Energy efficiency and renewable energy sources are also high on the global agenda and several ISO technical committees are active in this area, developing standards for solar energy, nuclear energy, hydrogen technologies, technical energy systems and environmental building design.

For example, ISO/TS 21931 was developed to provide a general framework for improving the quality and comparability of methods for assessing the environmental performance of buildings. It is intended to be used in conjunction with ISO 14001. In the same sector, ISO/TS 21929 provides a framework, and gives guidelines for the development and selection of appropriate sustainability indicators for buildings.

ISO standards can also help to facilitate the development of innovative technologies and to bring products and services derived from them rapidly onto the market. Its work in the field of nanotechnologies is a good example. At present, TC 229 'Nanotechnologies', is developing standards for terminology and nomenclature, metrology and instrumentation. These will include specifications for reference materials, test methodologies, modelling and simulation, and science-based health, safety, and environmental practices.

The positive roles played in globalisation by ISO's standards for quality and environmental management systems include the following:

  • a unifying base for global businesses and supply chains - such as the automotive and oil and gas sectors
  • a technical support for regulation - as, for example, in the medical devices sector
  • a tool for major new economic players, such as organisations in China and India, to increase their participation in global supply chains, in export trade and business process outsourcing
  • a tool for regional integration - as shown by their adoption by new or potential members of the EU
  • in the rise of services in the global economy - nearly 33 per cent of ISO 9001 certificates and 31 per cent of ISO 14001 (1996 and 2004 versions) certificates in 2005 went to organisations in the service sectors
  • in the transfer of good practice - in 2005, the newcomers to ISO 9001 and/or ISO 14001 certification were 13 developing countries in Africa and the Pacific, and two transition economies in Europe and west Asia.

For example, ISO 9001 certification has been achieved in Burkina Faso, Turkmenistén and Vanuatu, with ISO 14001 certification in Libya, Mozambique and Moldova.

Genesis of an ISO standard

Because ISO standards are voluntary and are developed by experts loaned by business, government and other organisations from the sectors that need the standards, ISO takes great care before launching new work to ensure that it is really relevant to the market, on a worldwide basis.

This was especially the case when ISO was requested to venture into a new area, that of the social responsibility (SR) of organisations.

The need for ISO to work on an SR standard was first identified in 2000 by ISO/COPOLCO, Committee on consumer policy. In 2002, ISO's Technical Management Board (TMB) formed the multi-stakeholder ISO Ad Hoc Group on SR which carried out an extensive overview of SR initiatives and issues worldwide.

In 2004, ISO held an international, multi-stakeholder conference on whether or not it should launch SR work. The positive recommendation of this conference led to the establishment in late 2004 of the ISO Working Group on social responsibility (WG SR) to develop the future ISO 26000 standard.

ISO is taking action to ensure that the standard will benefit from broad input by all those with a serious interest in social responsibility. This is being achieved by a balanced representation in the working group, of six designated stakeholder categories: industry, government, labour, consumers, nongovernmental organisations and others, in addition to geographical and gender-based balance. The target date for publication is November 2009.

The objective is to produce a guidance document, written in plain language that is understandable and useable by non-specialists, and not a specification document intended for third-party certification.

The work is intended to add value to, and not replace, existing inter-governmental agreements with relevance to social responsibility, such as the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and those adopted by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The standard should be useable by organisations of all sizes, in countries at every stage of development.

For more information visit www.iso.org/sr

Standards 'clusters'

Looking to the future, ISO is progressively proposing comprehensive 'clusters' of complementary deliverables addressing a whole sector or broad issue. This is the case for:

  • quality management, which it regularly updates and complements, eg the publication in 2006 of ISO 10014 which gives guidelines for realising economic and financial benefits through quality management
  • environmental management and climate change, with the ISO 14000 series, recently complemented by ISO 14064 and 14065
  • food safety management, with the ISO 22000 series, with the addition of ISO 22005 on traceability management
  • IT quality and security, with standards on IT security management, ISO 27001, and on IT services, ISO 20000
  • security, with the corresponding strategic advisory group, which associates the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU), ISO/TC 223 'Societal security', and the ISO 28000 series on security management in the supply chain
  • healthcare, with standards covering the quality, safety and clinical assessment of medical devices and dental products, clinical laboratories, risk assessment, as well as health informatics and the support to telemedicine
  • conformity assessment, with a 'CASCO toolbox' already quite comprehensive and vastly referenced and used across the world. ISO has undertaken a review of ISO/IEC Guide 65 on product certification, which will eventually become ISO/IEC 17065. This will be of interest worldwide to companies, certification bodies and testing laboratories along with the recently published ISO/IEC 17021.

ISO standards benefit from different perspectives from the ISO national members, from business and industry, and from international governmental and non-governmental organisations. ISO will continue to work to ensure they are recognised, accepted and implemented around the globe

Biography

Alan Bryden is secretary general of ISO. He took up the post in 2003, moving across from the French national standards body AFNOR, where he was director general.