ISO 9000 is booming. About 130,000 companies worldwide are now registered to the quality management system standard, according to the latest release of the Mobil Survey. ISO 14000, the environmental management system standard, is also continuing to grow and may become a part of the ISO 9000 standard, causing even more companies to pursue certification. As anyone who has pursued ISO 9000 or ISO 14000 will tell you, documenting your management system and putting procedures into place to meet the needs of a QMS or EMS can be a tiresome and tedious process. Fortunately, over the years, a wide variety of software products have cropped up to help harried quality managers and their teams prepare for that first audit. In the buyers guide matrix, which you can download by clicking here, you will find more than 300 software products that aid the user in some aspect of ISO 9000 documentation or implementation. The software ranges from titles designed explicitly for ISO 9000, such as documentation and calibration management, to titles not necessarily designed with ISO 9000 in mind but that serve a valuable purpose for those involved with the standard, such as statistical process control and failure analysis software. The matrix includes the company name, phone number, web address and products of participating companies. In most cases, we included all the products submitted by a company. However, due to space limitations we couldn't list all products. As much as possible, we cut from companies that had submitted more than four products, and then cut only those products that seemed on the very fringe of ISO 9000 applicability. Across from each software title, you will find an "x" beneath the ISO 9000 section number to which the software best applies. In case you haven't memorized the 20 ISO 9000 elements, here they are: 4.1 Management responsibility 4.2 Quality system 4.3 Contract review 4.4 Design control 4.5 Document and data control 4.6 Purchasing 4.7 Control of customer-supplied product 4.8 Product identification and traceability 4.9 Process control 4.10 Inspection and testing 4.11 Control of inspection, measuring and test equipment 4.12 Inspection and test status 4.13 Control of nonconforming product 4.14 Corrective and preventive action 4.15 Handling, storage, packaging, preservation and delivery 4.16 Control of quality records 4.17 Internal quality audits 4.18 Training 4.19 Servicing 4.20 Statistical techniques As with all our guides, the ISO 9000 Software Buyers Guide is in no way meant to endorse or exclude any particular organization. It is meant to be used as the starting point in the data-gathering phase. To ensure the accuracy of the information, we list only information that we have collected ourselves. If you find this guide helpful or have any observations you would like to share with us, please feel free to contact us by phone or e-mail us at isoguide@qualitydigest.com.
Because of the complexity of this matrix, it is not available for reading directly off the Web. However, you can download the file and read it using Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you do not have a copy of this program it is available free from Adobe by clicking on the Get Acrobat icon.
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