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Introduction
In September 2015 a new version of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001: 2015 Quality Management Systems – Requirements was released which contained for the first time an obligation for organizations to consider the role of organizational knowledge as a resource. This specification will position knowledge more centrally within the quality management policies of more than one million certified organizations worldwide (ISO, 2014a) and require them to systematically consider all the stages of the knowledge management cycle. There are also many other organizations which use the ISO 9001 standard to enhance their quality systems but do not seek certification, and these, too, will increasingly consider the role of organizational knowledge.
This paper is the first to systematically relate the key fundamentals of knowledge management to the seven quality management principles (QMPs) of ISO 9001: 2015. It will begin with a discussion of the development of ISO 9001 standards and then examine the development and stages of the knowledge management cycle and then extend it to consider suppliers and customers. The paper will then explore the relationship of knowledge to each of the QMPs paying particular attention to explicit and tacit knowledge. Finally, it will draw some conclusions to assist organizations as they integrate knowledge within their quality management systems.
The development of International Organization for Standardization 9001 quality standards
As manufactured products became increasingly sophisticated, it became more challenging to inspect their final quality and also more costly for manufacturers if products were rejected. Moreover, large customers were independently conducting inspections and duplicating effort and cost. To address these challenges, the US Department of Defense (1959) issued a specification for quality – Quality Program Requirements (MIL-Q-9858) (US Department of Defense, 1959), and in 1973, the UK Defence Standards DEF STAN 05-21/1 – “Quality Control System Requirements for Industry” (Ministry of Defence, 1973) was published and based on earlier North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) quality standards issued at the end of the 1960s. In effect, all these standards changed the emphasis from post-production quality inspection and control to ensuring that quality was built into the manufacturing processes from the beginning, i.e. quality assurance. For the purposes of clarification:
A standard is a document that provides requirements, specifications, guidelines or characteristics that can be used consistently...