CHAPTER 2: A BRIEF HISTORY OF QUALITY MANAGEMENT AND ISO 9001

The pursuit of quality and consistency goes back a long time – probably as long as trade has existed. A craftsman or merchant in the traditional mould wants their product to be the best fit to requirements that it can be so they can minimise costly reworking and ensure ongoing demand/funding. In pre-industrial societies, production was typically conducted by an individual responsible for all parts of the final product or service, so training and practising was by far the most common way to ensure quality.

When industrialisation arrived in the eighteenth century, the distribution of labour between both people and machines meant that traditional quality practices were no longer really effective or necessary. An employer didn’t want to have to train someone to be good at their job when it was more useful to have them replaceable; rather, jobs were typically reduced to performing the smallest part of the whole, making the employee – like the machine – almost entirely replaceable.

In splitting labour up in this way, standardisation became an important aspect of manufacturing. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Eli Whitney popularised the use of interchangeable parts in muskets to reduce per-unit costs and increase the lifetime of the weapon (thereby also making notable contributions to cost accountancy).

Achieving true interchangeability naturally requires those parts to be standardised. To get this standardisation, you either need to have appropriately skilled workers, precision tools or easily replicated processes. Of the three options, the third is clearly the cheapest and simplest. Certainly, you can’t guarantee exceptional quality with this method, but you can get consistent results and production can also be kept high without expensive equipment or highly trained employees.

This culminated in Henry Ford’s improvement of the assembly line that reduced the worker’s role almost to that of a cog in the machine, thereby reducing the time to build a car from 12 hours to merely 93 minutes. Goods could be produced quickly, efficiently, cheaply and – most importantly – to a consistent standard. Although Ford’s innovations are generally seen as an advance in manufacturing technologies, the principles clearly fall within the realm of quality management.

Formalised quality management, however, is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s older than many other business disciplines, but in the grander narrative of history it’s positively youthful. The first formalised QMS was set out in MIL-Q-9858 in 1959, which was a description of quality programme requirements for military contractors in the US. Although it was updated several times, it was eventually replaced in 1996 in favour of supporting industry consensus standards rather than enforcing government directives.

This specification contained a great deal that is still relevant today: establishing workflows, controlling inputs and outputs, establishing quality objectives and so on. Rather than having been disproved or rendered redundant over the years, these fundamental points have evolved and been iterated upon.

While MIL-Q-9858 was in use, private industry had already begun developing codified processes for quality management. BS 5179 (released in 1974) was among the first, and is the clear predecessor to ISO 9001. Being developed as a national standard provided a great deal of attention and provided evidence and feedback, enabling the Standard to evolve further, into BS 5750 in 1979. Although BS 5179 had provided guidance on quality systems, it did not actually provide a specification for a QMS. This led many organisations to develop their own systems using the advice from BS 5179, but also led to difficulties in providing customers and business partners with appropriate assurance.

BS 5750 was the first standard to describe an actual QMS, which generated enough interest that ISO developed it as ISO 9001:1987. This has since been updated several times, in 1994, 2000, 2008 and 2015.

By 2000, there were 457,834 ISO 9001 certifications worldwide, which leapt to 1,118,510 by 2010. As of 2014, the growth had slowed, but it remains by far the most widely adopted ISO management system standard, with 1,138,155 certifications worldwide.² The Standard has traditionally been popular in Europe and Japan, but in recent years the BRIC nations have invested heavily in meeting the requirements of the specification, such that the Russian Federation, India and China now feature in the top ten (China, in fact, now accounts for about a quarter of all ISO 9001 certifications).

² All statistics from the ISO Survey, www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/certification/iso-survey.htm.