Content area
Abstract
In year 2000, ISO 9000 standards underwent a major. This change poses a serious challenge for both ISO 9001:1994 registered companies and auditing professionals. This thesis provides solutions in quality auditing to help them to accommodate to this standard revision.
By applying process management principles, a process-based audit model is proposed to enable auditors to perform an ISO 9001:2000 audit. The whole quality system is evaluated as a set of interrelated processes. The process performance is measured against predetermined objectives and targets to identify possible improvement opportunities. The entire auditing process consists of top management audit and departmental audit to obtain the full picture of the quality system implementation and improvement.
Subsequently, auditing methodologies aiming to assist the organization transform its quality system to ISO 9001:2000 are explored. Combined with the regular system audit, a perpetual self-audit model has been designed to serve this purpose. In this model, three levels of self-audits are proposed, namely micro-audit, milli-audit and nano-audit, that are implemented throughout the various organizational levels.
In the last part of this thesis, the process-based audit and the perpetual self-audit model were successfully implemented to transform the quality system of a case study company to conform to the ISO 9001:2000 standard.
