ISO 9000

from the Perspective of Competitive Advantage

by
Edwin B. Dean

Today, ISO 9000 certification is rapidly becoming a competive factor. The impetus for ISO certification in the USA came from the desire to sell products in Europe, which has been the forerunner in requiring ISO 9000 certification for suppliers. However, it is becoming the standard internationally.

However, Morup (1992) notes that "It has become good business to promote and sell ISO 9000 certification as the way to join the quality bandwagon. However, certification appears to us to be nothing more than a craze, which is only able to help those companies that have poor quality control. It is just a matter of time before certification is no longer a competitive factor. In fact, many companies have characterized ISO 9000 as several steps backward from where their total quality management systems are today. Instead of believing that we can ensure the quality of our products by focusing on certificates and on the quality of our control systems, we should rather concentrate on the fact that quality in the final analysis needs to be designed into the product"

To have the competitive advantage tomorrow requires that your company go well beyond ISO 9000.

Smith and Angeli (1995) go beyond the usual instructive material and link ISO 9000 to the quality perspectives of Crosby, Deming, Feigenbaum, Ishikawa, and Juran. Forsberg (1995) discusses continuing improvement of and within ISO 9000.

References

Forsberg, K. (1995). "Room in ISO 9000 for Continuous Improvement," European Quality, Vol. 2, No. 5.
Morup, M. (1992). "A New Design for Quality Paradigm," Journal of Engineering Design, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 63-80.
Smith, J. A. and I. I. Angeli (1995). "The Use of Quality Function Deployment to Help Adopt a Total Quality Strategy," Total Quality Management, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 35-44.

Bibliographies

ISO 9000 Bibliography

Surfing the Web

ISO 9000 News Service
ISO Easy
Quality Management Principles from ISO Technical Committee I76/SC2/WG I5
NIST - ISO 9000 Registration

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