Quality management: a new look for ISO 9004

ISO 9001’s “little sister”, the voluntary ISO 9004 standard, has just been revised. It provides guidelines for deploying quality management to achieve sustainable performance within the organization.

Like ISO 9001 in 2015, the international voluntary standard ISO 9004, one of its little sisters, has just been given a makeover. Orchestrated by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) technical committee TC 176, on which AFNOR represented France, the revision resulted in a text published in April 2018, available in the AFNOR collection here nine years after the previous version.

How does it differ from the content of the famous ISO 9001, the benchmark for all quality specialists worldwide? Rodolphe Civet, project manager at AFNOR Normalisation, who coordinated the contributions of French stakeholders on this subject, replies: ” Precisely because it’s not just for quality specialists. The text provides guidelines for achieving sustainable performance over time. It is therefore more a good governance standard than a quality management standard. ”

ISO 9004:2018: a systems approach

Unlike ISO 9001, which deals with the management of product and service quality with a view, in particular, to improving customer satisfaction, ISO 9004 offers a more general perspective on quality management with a view to improving company performance, the longer-term objective being economic survival. ISO 9004 addresses this by recommending less of a process approach and more of a systems approach. Users are invited to make it their own, in the knowledge that they do not need to know or apply ISO 9001.