‘ISO 9000 Handbook Fourth Edition’ Provides Roadmap to Meet December 2003 Deadline
FAIRFAX, Va. — A new comprehensive roadmap is
available for the 50,000 predominantly manufacturing organizations in the
United States, Canada and Mexico that are facing a December 2003 deadline to
upgrade their third-party quality certifications to ISO 9001:2000. This is the
latest edition of the international quality management system standard and an
important contractual requirement for automotive, aerospace, defense,
electronics, chemical processing and numerous other industries.
The “ISO 9000 Handbook Fourth Edition” was
released by QSU Publishing Company as a continuation of the original
best-selling handbook series that has guided thousands of organizations to
certification and implementation over the past decade. The book contains all-new
content designed to assist organizations in the transition to ISO 9001:2000, no
matter what the company size or industry. It includes dozens of new charts,
tables and checklists, including a comprehensive registrar matrix.
Editor Robert W. Peach, one of the world’s foremost
authorities on the international quality phenomenon, offers a clause-by-clause
review of the new standard. The book also includes an overview of the
registration process, guidance on conducting internal quality audits, an understanding of registrar
accreditation issues, a worldwide snapshot of ISO 9000:2000 trends, a guide to
implementing ISO 9001:2000, conversion tips from the 1994 standards, practical
documentation tools and even a quality system checklist, all of which could
potentially save thousands of dollars and countless hours of development time,
the editor said.
The handbook, which is co-published by The McGraw-Hill
Companies, for the first time ships with a bonus CD-ROM featuring exclusive
transition tips and guidance from each of QSU Publishing’s Big Ten
registrars of North America, along with the verbatim text of ISO 9001:2000, ISO
9000:2000 and ISO 9004:2000.
“Whatever the motivation, whether to protect sales to
the European Union, to respond to the requirements of large customers or to
adopt the standard on the basis of good quality practice, there is a need to
understand not only the content and use of the standard, but also the
marketplace factors that are influencing adoption of the ISO 9000 standards
worldwide,” said Peach.
The handbook also contains comprehensive guidance on related
standards: ISO/TS 16949, ISO 13485, QS-9000,
TL 9000, AS9100 and ISO/IEC 17025, plus ISO 9000 in software
environments, the chemical and construction industries and U.S. government
agencies. It provides integration advice on aligning an ISO 9000 system with
European Union conformity assessment requirements, Malcolm Baldrige National
Quality Award criteria, TQM programs and ISO 14001.
ISO 9001:2000 establishes universally accepted requirements
for quality management that have been adopted and sanctioned by standards
bodies in most industrialized nations. The presence of an ISO 9001:2000
certificate informs purchasers that companies have a technically sound quality
system and a foundation for expanded quality practice to which principles of
total quality management are applied, according to Peach. Purchasers are
assured that a company has a management system to achieve its quality
objectives and a structure to help it continually improve the management system
through corrective and preventive actions and training.
Peach was the first chairman of the Registrar Accreditation
Board, which he helped form and where he served for ten years. He established
the quality assurance activity at Sears Roebuck and Company and managed it for
more than 25 years. In this capacity, he and his staff worked with quality
systems in the plants of hundreds of suppliers. At intervals, Peach has
evaluated and planned quality management training in developing nations for the
World Bank. His many years of work with the ISO 9000 family of standards earned
him the first Freund Marquardt medal from the American Society for Quality for
his distinguished contribution to the field of management systems.
Contact www.qsuonline.com for more information.
This article originally appeared in the December 2002 issue of Recharger.