ISO 9000 : History

Errors committed in manufacturing have been an impetus for creating quality standards. For example, in World War I, a high percentage of shells failed to explode. This was traced to different definitions of an inch by the two major UK armaments manufacturers, leading to calibration standards.

During World War II, the United Kingdom had a serious problem with accidental detonations in weapons factories. In an attempt to solve the problem, the Ministry of Defence placed inspectors in the factories to oversee the production process. To supply to the Government, a company had to write up the procedure for making their product, have the procedure approved by the Ministry and ensure that their workers followed the procedure. None of the early commercial Quality Gurus, such as Walter Shewhart, W. Edwards Deming or Phillip Crosby advocated rigorous adherence to written Procedures as a method of achieving or improving quality.

In 1959, the United States developed Quality Program Requirements, a quality standard for military procurement, detailing what suppliers had to do to achieve conformance. By 1962, NASA had similarly developed Quality System Requirements for its suppliers and applied these techniques on the project "travel to the moon" with great success. In 1968, NATO adopted the AQAP (Allied Quality Assurance Procedures) specifications for the procurement of NATO equipment. In 1970, the AEC (which has become the NRC) adopted the 18 Quality Assurance criteria for the construction of nuclear power plants. These criteria were published in the Appendix B of the 10CFR50 (the American legislation about nuclear power reactors) and are still applicable today. They can be read on NRC website ( www.nrc.gov ).

The idea of quality assurance spread beyond the military and nuclear sectors. In 1966, the United Kingdom Government led the first national campaign for quality and reliability with the slogan "Quality is everybody's business." In 1969, the UK and Canada developed quality assurance standards for suppliers.

By this time, suppliers were being assessed by any number of their customers. In 1969, a UK committee report on the subject recommended that suppliers' methods should be assessed against a generic standard of quality assurance, to avoid duplication of effort.

In 1971, the British Standards Institution (BSI) published the first UK standard for quality assurance, BS 9000, which was developed for the electronics industry. In 1974, BSI published BS 5179, Guidelines for Quality Assurance.

In order to shift the burden of inspection from the customer, quality assurance was guaranteed by the supplier through third-party inspection, though none of the assessing bodies at that time accepted any legal liability for the quality of their decisions. The collapse of a jetty at Dover, which had been assessed by LRQA, an assessing body, and the subsequent court case forced a rethink.

Through the 1970s, BSI organized meetings with industry to set a common standard. The result was BS 5750 in 1979, which however much consulation there was, turned out to be an almost exact replica of the DEF-STAN 05-21/24 series of military quality assurance Standards, driven by a Rear Admiral Spikernell who took over as Director General of BSI after a spell in charge of military purchasing. Key industry bodies agreed to drop their own standards and use it instead. The purpose of BS 5750 was to provide a common contractual document, demonstrating that industrial production was controlled.

In 1982 the UK government produced a White Paper No. 8621 entitled "Standards, Quality and International Competitiveness". This introduced the concept of certification of a company's management system as a marketing tool. Obviously, an independent third party was needed to ensure fairness. The original idea in the white paper was that BSI would partner with trade associations to produce industry sector-specific variants of BS 5750, but since these variants were never allowed to exceed the basic requirements of BS 5750, and few trade bodies had the necessary resources, BSI became the first de facto assessors.

The lack of technical expertise in the first assessors, and the inevitable fact that the first generation of assessors were trained by people with purely military quality assurance skills caused many problems. At the time, military procurement contracts were given on a cost-plus basis, so on-costs such as inspection, internal auditing and procedure writing became profit centers.