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Opponents of QS-9000's Third Edition claim the Big Three's new demands are inefficient and unreasonable. Supporters say the changes are no big deal.
Procrastinators beware-Your QS-9000 Second Edition registration is now officially obsolete. As of January 1, your QS9000 quality system should already be in compliance with the Third Edition of the standard. If it isn't, you only have until your first audit this year to make it so.
Although the Third Edition itself is a fait accompli, quality professionals are still debating the merits and failings of the changes it entails. Some say the changes amount to little more than a clarification of what was already required in the Second Edition, while others protest that the added restrictions inhibit improvement efforts, waste time and resources, and tighten the Big Three's chokehold on automotive suppliers that are just struggling to survive. Some of these fears are valid. Others can be assuaged by a more careful examination of what the standard actually requires. In either case, you can be sure that the controversy will continue.
Many of the changes in the Third Edition were simply the result of incorporating information from the International Auto Sector Group's sanctioned interpretations of QS9000 into the text of the standard itself to clarify the meaning of the requirements, explained Larry Thisse, QS-9000 consultant for Management Resources International Inc., a Saline, MI, quality training and consulting firm. "There weren't a lot of huge surprises in the Third Edition. It was mainly a culmination of the interpretations that had been coming up over a period of time. They also added some quality requirements from some of the European standards. Most of the rest of it was formatting changes.
"There originally were three sections of QS-9000," he elaborated. "The first section was the 20 elements based on the ISO 9001 series. The second section was the three separate elements that the automotive industry had added: PPAP [production part-approval process], continuous improvement, and manufacturing capability. The third section was the Chrysler-, Ford-, and General Motors-specific information. One of the formatting differences was they took the Section Two information and incorporated it within the original 20 ISO elements in Section One. So there wasn't different information, it was just simply rearranged to fit into...