Understanding the newly revised quality management standard

15 September 2016

The world’s most popular standard for quality management, ISO 9001:2015, recently underwent the first major revision since it was published back in 2000. Written with today’s business challenges in mind, the new version offers multiple benefits to organizations of any size in many different industries. It’s not just a quality management tool, but a significant framework for business improvement, delivering efficiencies and improving customer satisfaction.

Major changes

While customers remain the primary focus of the ISO 9001 standard, the updated version includes a foundation for integration with other management systems, an introduction to risk-based thinking, insights into how to align quality management system policies and objectives with organizational strategy, and greater flexibility with documentation. The end result is a quality management system that helps to improve products and services, inspire trust, reduce the likelihood of mistakes, attract new customers and increase competitiveness.

Next steps

To gain a better understanding of the changes and how they will impact your business, it is critical that each company set up a project team to manage the changes and communicate the project across the whole organization. This involves creating an implementation plan and monitoring progress, taking a fresh look at your quality management system and indicating opportunities for improvement, making changes to your documentation to reflect the new structure, and implementing the new requirements on leadership, risk and context of the organization.

BSI’s role

As a leading provider of business improvement solutions, BSI can help navigate the latest revisions and the impacts of these changes on businesses. It offers a range of courses, developed by experts involved in the new standard, to give attendees all the information needed to prepare for a smooth transition. BSI Canada offers Transition classes coast to coast across Canada.

To learn more about ISO Transition Training,  or visit the BSI Group’s website.