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QUALITY IN THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY

ISO MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS, MAY / JUNE 2003

ISO 9001 is becoming the base standard for a huge variety of industries worldwide, including automobile manufacture. ISO 9001 has evolved - the year 2000 standard focuses less on procedure and paperwork and more on product realization and the process approach. It reflects the way in which today’s businesses operate. This is a summary of an article by Henry Gryn from the May / June 2003 edition of ISO Management Systems.

For the first time in history, the highly competitive automobile industry has reached consensus through the International Automotive Task Force (IATF) on a common set of supplier quality requirements that were developed and published in March 2002 by ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) as ISO/TS 16949:2002, Quality Management Systems – particular requirements for the application of ISO 9001:2000 for automotive production and relevant service part organizations.

This standard adds automotive specific requirements such as employee competence, awareness and training, design and development, production and service provision, control of monitoring and measuring devices and measurement, analysis and improvement onto ISO 9001:2000.

ISO 9001 was an extremely useful foundation document because the core requirements are consistent with Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) quality requirements in the automobile industry. The standard was found to be much improved over the 1994 edition in that it is geared toward the way a company does business, not whether you have “this paperwork or that paperwork”. ISO 9001:2000 recognises that each and every company is a little unique because each one does things in a different way.

Only organizations that add value to the manufacturing process may be awarded certification to the new requirement, functions such as sales, purchasing and engineering may be listed as supporting organisations. The second edition of ISO/TS 16949 permits the certification of assembly plants.

Those that will be impacted by ISO/TS 16949 are primarily direct manufacturing suppliers to BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Fiat, Ford Motor Company, General Motors Corporation, PSA Peugeot Citroen, Renault and Volkswagen. The new standard is expected to become the common and unique basis for the automotive industry’s quality management system requirements worldwide, gradually replacing the multiple national specifications now used by the sector (e.g., QS-9000, AVSQ, VDA6.1 and EAQF) Suppliers will all be transitioned to ISO/TS 16949 by no later than December 2006.

Under the new standard every supplier must provide auditors with current customer ratings prior to each audit along with a list of customers, performance data from the previous 12-month period, a list of internal auditors and internal audit results. Auditors have a new process based approach, they are expected to use control plans, failure mode effect analysis and part approval rates as a vehicle for their audits and to verify that customer specific requirements are being met.

One of the strengths of the new technical specification is that it is aligned with the process-based approach of ISO 9001:2000. The complaint that the quality system audit was too oriented to procedures based on an element-by-element assessment has been addressed. The new focus on product realization and the process approach reflects consistency with the way automotive companies in the supply chain operate.