14) ‘Quality Assurance Standards’ to ‘Quality Management Standards’
To require products with guaranteed quality is one of criteria when you purchase anything.
It is taken as a course of matter nowadays, but do you know how quality assurance standards have developed?
Reliable quality is essential.
In other words, we don’t accept products literally ‘fall short of the target’’.
It is neither a euphonium nor a metaphor.
A quality assurance standard was first introduced by The US Army in 1963 when they established their own standards to select vendors. Subsequently, NATO developed its standards in 1986.
In European counties and the US, the higher consumers’ awareness and supervisions towards product qualities rose, the more positively governments and organizations prompted to establish national standards.
In 1979, BS5750 was introduced in UK, followed by US product quality campaign in 1980.
As the liberalization of international trade extended, quality standards in each country needed to be integrated as an international quality standard, which led to the most globally populated ISO 9000s.
ISO 9000s basically require standardizing appropriate quality assurance system and obtain audit evidence objectively. In accordance with the changes in the times, ‘quality assurance standards’ changed to ‘quality management standards’;
in 1987 ISO 9000
in 1996 ISO9001
in 2008 ISO9001:2000
Even now, ISOs have been making progress with taking Japanese comprehensive quality management into account.
Principles and guidelines of quality management standards will be introduced in next issue.