The world will have to wait a little longer for the next iteration of its best selling voluntary standard for quality management systems.

Meeting in Tralee, Ireland, standards writers publicly acknowledged for the first time that the planned 2008 release of the next ISO 9001 standard is overly ambitious given the level of progress to date.

“France and New Zealand gave a joint presentation at the closing plenary which showed that if the work on ISO 9001 were to proceed along the usual development path for an ISO standard, then publication of the 9001 amendment would be achieved around mid 2009,” states a communiqué issued after the June meeting of Subcommittee 2 of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 176, which is responsible for what is intended to be only a minor revision to the document (see complete text of communiqué page 6).

Craig Williams, who represented US interests at the meeting, tells QSU that the planned publication date was postponed from the third quarter of 2008 when standards writers failed to gain sufficient consensus to elevate an initial Working Draft (WD) to the level of a Committee Draft (CD) at the meetings.

“That puts you back a little right there,” observes Williams of the Eaton Corporation. “We’ve got some cleanup to do. I’m not sure exactly how long it’s going to take to do that.”

The initial WD, which was released in March, incorporated some 24 possible changes to the next ISO 9001, according to a QSU analysis. At that time, the proposed changes affected some 17 clauses of the standard along with the informative annexes.

Standards writers reviewed approximately 80 pages of comments on the WD for ISO 9001, and another 29 pages of comments on a WD for the ISO 9004 guidance standard, which is undergoing a much more extensive revision. The all-new ISO 9004 guidance document will assist companies that wish to exceed the minimum quality management system requirements of ISO 9001.

“There were requests for things that were outside the scope of the design specification that weren’t considered,” according to Williams. “Things that were within the design specification were primarily clarifications.”

The design specification governing the drafting work on ISO 9001 limits the effort to only those changes deemed to improve clarity, translatability, ease of use, consistency within the ISO 9000 family or further compatibility with the ISO 14001 standard on environmental management systems.

“Some of the comments were things that were clearly outside of the design specification,” says Williams, adding that a few minor changes are being considered which will require an amendment to the design specification. “When I say a change, it’s not a substantive change to the design specification allowing more latitude. The design specification was pretty specific as to which clauses we could even work on.”

At least one additional working draft will be issued before the document is elevated to the level of a CD,where it will again be circulated among participating ISO member bodies for comment. Once elevated, the document is likely to be reissued as a CD for ballot, Draft International Standard (DIS) and eventually a Final DIS or (FDIS) before publication as an International Standard (IS).

Possible areas that could be targeted for change in subsequent drafts of ISO 9001 include the sections dealing with control of nonconforming product and outsourcing, which could be massaged to be more user friendly for service organizations.

With the planned publication of the so-called amendment in 2009, the next major revision of the standard probably would not occur until 2020 at the earliest.  But that too is subject to change.