ISO 9001:2015 reaches penultimate stage -

ISO 9001:2015 reaches penultimate stage

ISO 9001:2015 is nearly upon us with the revised version due to be published in September. The International Standards Organisation (ISO) recently released a statement stating that ISO 9001:2015 had progressed to the Final Draft International Stage (FDIS); the final stage in the revision process. The FDIS contains the majority of the content that will be published in the full standard but there may still be some changes between the FDIS and the final publication. All going well the revised standard will be published in September.

At this stage, ISO member countries have two months to form a national position and vote on the latest draft of the standard before 9^th September deadline. The vote at the Draft International Stage (DIS) was approved in November 2014 by 90% of members, but the committee also received over 3,000 comments with suggestions on possible improvements. Since then the committee has met twice and carried out extensive online discussions in order to analyse and decide on each and every comment received during the vote.

Nigel Croft – Chair of the ISO subcommittee (ISO/TC 176/SC2) revising the standard has said that compared with the DIS the FDIS has:

“Relatively minor changes. The most extensive ones have been to the introduction and figures, which have been greatly simplified, with some of the explanatory text being moved to an informative Annex…..[there has been] a general ‘tidying-up’ of the overall text and greater consistency in the use of specific terms, there have been a number of small technical changes.”

ISO 9001:2015 will differ from previous versions of the standard as:

ISO 9001:1987 and 1994 were quite prescriptive with many specific requirements for documented procedures and records.
ISO 9001:2000 version focused on managing processes and required less documentation.
This was maintained in the 2008 version.
ISO 9001:2015 is even less prescriptive than ISO 9001:2008, with an underlying philosophy that output matters.

ISO 9001:2015 is very much performance-based. It focuses on what has to be achieved rather than how to achieve it. This has been achieved by combining the process approach with risk-based thinking and using the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycles at all levels in the organisation, while also taking the context in which the organisation operates into consideration.

Submitted by our Quality tutors, Antaris

Sources:

International Standards Organisation