ISO 9000

[Don Smith <dsmith -at- ACCESSBEYOND -dot- COM>]

     Hi Elaine -

     I have been "reading the mail" about your question regarding ISO 9000
     and I thought I would give you my 2 cents worth.

     At the company I work (Access Beyond), we became ISO 9000 certified
     about two years or more ago. (Now ISO 9001.) This is a method which
     the whole company goes through together. I guess to boil everything
     down, the following thoughts are probably the basic information as to
     "what it is".

     The idea is that ISO 9000 is a plan to *try* and improve the Quality
     Assurance of a manufacturers operating methods and of course their
     product(s). To be "ISO 9000 compliant" means basically that a company
     has a way to handle manufacturing of a product, operation of their
     business and handle problems that come up in an orderly, predicable
     way.

     For example: In the Publications Department we were permitted to use
     whatever methods we wanted (in good practice of course)to perform
     checks on the quality of our publication effort, but we had to produce
     forms (and/or method(s)) for making the checks. An example of this is
     the process that we use for releasing a document to the printer. There
     are a number of steps and sign-offs as the document gets through the
     release process. ISO 9000 did *not* tell us what to do to release a
     document, rather we tell them the process we go through to release the
     document and show a form which is used to provide internal "proof" to
     us that the document meets *our* standard before it is released.

     ISO 9000 does not tell you "how", instead the company states to ISO
     9000 people how they have decided to check the quality of the
     operations in each department and process of the company and provide
     identifiable methods for maintaining control over these methods that
     are used. Each department comes up with its own method of assuring
     quality. It designs its own forms and methods.

     This is a pretty crude explanation, but maybe it will be of help to
     you. A company becomes "compliant" when all departments have a
     reproducible, identifiable, workable quality method for each
     department of their company which suits the *company*, and is deemed
     satisfactory by the people who certify ISO 9000.

     Don Smith
     Senior Technical Writer