Seaver Associates
and the development of ISO 9000:2000
The ISO 9000 family of standards was
revised and published in December 2000.
Registered companies have until December 2003 to implement the changes
to their quality management systems in order to maintain registration. ISO 9002 and ISO 9003 have disappeared, and all affected companies
must now be certified or registered to ISO 9001. The 2000 version of ISO 9001
introduced some fundamental changes that will have to be addressed by all
companies. If you decide that you need advice on how best to implement the
changes it is essential to take advice from a competent expert. In the past
many companies got bad advice and set up systems and procedures that were
unnecessarily complex. This is an opportunity to review your entire system
and make sure that the system you operate in future works for you rather than
the other way round! Dr Matt Seaver, our principal, has been an expert member of ISO
Technical Committee 176 since 1992. Since that committee is the body that
actually writes the standards, he can truly be regarded as one of the
authors. Matt spent many years as a quality manager in manufacturing and
learned the importance of having simple procedures. He can give you practical
help to set up a quality management system that is effective in improving
your performance. During the process of revising the ISO 9000 standards Matt’s
working group carried out a worldwide
survey of user requirements for the
standards on behalf of the International Organization for Standardization
(ISO). Check out the
ISO website for an article he wrote on the findings of this survey. As part of
ISO’s own customer focus it is now starting the process of gathering customer
feedback in relation to the new standards. ISO TC176 has now appointed him to lead the Task Group on
Communication and User Feedback, which will, in the coming months, set up a
communication network through which users of ISO 9001:2000 can let the
authors of the standard know of their experiences with the new standard. In 2000 he was
commissioned by Gower Publishing Ltd to produce the definitive textbook on
the new ISO 9000 standards, and you can find out more about this by clicking
the ‘Our Books’ link on the left
Click to return to our ISO 9000:2000
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