(ISO: Geneva) -- A new edition of ISO 9001 is being submitted for voting as a final draft international standard. Subject to formal approval by the ISO membership, the publication of the revised version is expected to be published this fall.

The proposed ISO 9001:2008 doesn’t introduce additional requirements compared to the last edition in 2000 and doesn’t change the intent of ISO 9001:2000.

The draft international standard was approved at the May 19–23, 2008, meeting of ISO technical committee ISO/TC 176—“Quality management and quality assurance,” held in Novi Sad, Serbia, and hosted by ISS, the Serbian national standards body. ISO 9001 will be circulated in July as a final draft, on which ISO’s national member bodies as a whole may vote.

ISO 9001 provides the requirements for a quality management system (QMS), which is a framework for an organization to control its processes to achieve objectives including customer satisfaction, regulatory compliance, and continual improvement. Organizations that implement the standard can choose to have their QMS independently certified as conforming to the requirements of ISO 9001, as a means of increasing the confidence of their business partners, customers, and regulators in their products and services.

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