Support Documents for ISO 9001

Often-overlooked help is just a click away at the ISO Web site.

Back in the late 1990s, during final development of ISO 9001:2000, ISO/TC 176 subcommittee 2 (SC2) decided to develop and publish a set of implementation and support packages to assist users in implementing or transitioning to the new version of ISO 9001. These documents were made available free of charge in portable document format (PDF) form at a public Web site. During the transition period (2001-2004), I found that most people using ISO 9001 were familiar with them. That situation appears to be changing. During the past year or so, I’ve met a growing number of people who work with ISO 9001 but are unaware that these excellent documents exist.

These aren’t “official” ISO guides, nor are they intended to be. Rather, they’re intended to help implementation and auditing to ISO 9001. (For a discussion of the official ISO guidance standards related to ISO 9001, see the article in the August 2005 issue of Quality Digest , “Guidance Documents for Using ISO 9001 Effectively.”)

The table in figure 1 lists the SC2 implementation and support packages currently available. You can download Microsoft Word versions at www.iso.org/tc176/sc2. In addition to the downloads in English, links are provided for versions in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. Note that the packages are subject to revisions to improve their usefulness, so a periodic check of the site for updates may be useful.

Also available are the audit practices documents listed in figure 2. These are available for downloading or viewing by clicking the “ISO 9001 Auditing Practices Group” link at www.iso.org/tc176/sc2. At the bottom of the page, you can click on “Zip file of all the above documents” and get the whole group in a 3 MB package.

These were created by the ISO 9001 Auditing Practices Group, an informal group of quality management system experts, auditors and practitioners. Members of the group are drawn from ISO/TC 176 and the International Accreditation Forum.

All of these documents may also be accessed by going to the official ISO Web site at www.iso.org. In the left column of the ISO home page, under ISO 9000/ISO 14000, click on “Explore further,” and you’ll see links to “ISO 9000:2000 series guidance modules,” where you’ll find HTML versions of the implementation and support packages. You’ll also see a link to the “ISO 9001:2000 auditing kit” that contains the auditing practices materials.

About the author
John E. (Jack) West is a consultant, business advisor and author with more than 30 years of experience in a wide variety of industries. From 1997 through 2005 he was chair of the U.S. TAG to ISO/TC 176 and lead delegate for the United States to the International Organization for Standardization committee responsible for the ISO 9000 series of quality management standards. He remains active in ISO/TC 176 and is chair of the ASQ Standards Group.