ISO 9001 User Survey - Contribute Your Opinion

ISO 9001 user survey
Posted November 26, 2010 - 08:53 by isohelpline ISO is carrying out a survey of existing and potential users of ISO 9001:2008, the global benchmark for quality management, to gather feedback to help decide whether the standard needs further improvement and, if so, what needs modifying.

ISO's rules require all its standards to be reviewed at least every five years to establish whether they should be confirmed, revised or withdrawn.

The survey can be accessed online at: www.iso.org/tc176/sc2/ISO9000UserSurvey

ISO 9001 is now firmly established as the globally implemented standard for providing assurance about the ability to satisfy quality requirements and to enhance customer satisfaction in supplier-customer relationships. Up to the end of December 2009, at least 1 064 785 ISO 9001 (2000 and 2008) certificates had been issued in 178 countries and economies.

The survey is being carried out by subcommittee SC 2, Quality management systems, of ISO technical committee ISO/TC 176, Quality management and quality assurance. SC 2 is responsible for ISO 9001:2008, Quality management systems – Requirements.
The output goals of the survey are:

• Third party-certified organizations
• Indicator of strengths/weaknesses of current ISO 9001:2008 content
• Indicator of gaps in current content
• Compatibility with other management system standards
• Views on the current structure of ISO 9001:2008
• Future market needs not currently addressed
• Feedback on conformity assessment for third party-certified users.

The survey is being made available in 11 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

A large part of the work will be done using the online tool SurveyMonkey. The survey will be open online from 1st week of October 2010 until January 2011, and report on the results is planned for end of March 2011.

As developer of the standard, ISO is seeking to ensure through the survey that the users of ISO 9001 continue to be satisfied. The ISO experts responsible for maintaining the relevance of ISO 9001 aim to gather feedback from both current and potential users of the standard.
Current users include:

• Third party-certified organizations
• Self-declaring organizations
• Organizations using ISO 9001 as minimum quality standard “frame” for their quality management systems (QMS)
• Certification bodies
• Consultants
• National standard bodies
• Accreditation bodies
• Purchasers/specifiers/requirers of ISO 9001 in the supply base.

Potential users include:

• Those organizations who
• Are aware of ISO 9001, but do not use it currently
• Have actively chosen not to use ISO 9001
• No longer use ISO 9001
• Use other quality models as basis for QMS
• Students
• Countries who have not adopted ISO standards.

ISO 9001:2008 is the fourth edition of the standard that was first published in 1987. The 2000 revision was the biggest, refocusing the standard on customer satisfaction and continual improvement. The latest revision, in 2008, introduced no new requirements and was mainly focused in improving the wording of the standard and on increasing its compatibility with the ISO 14001 for environmental management. ISO 9001 helps thousands of organizations around the world to ensure their customers are satisfied.

Taken from iso release http://www.iso.org/i...m?refid=Ref1368

Thanks for the 'heads up' Anish. Listening to customers, I like it.