ISO 9000 Implementation in Indian Manufacturing Organizations

Introduction The world has witnessed the growth of quality management systems standards such as ISO 9000 where by the end of year 2005, 776608 number of certifications awarded by 161 countries worldwide (ISO survey 2005) and emergence of Total Quality Management (TQM), Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Just in Time (JIT), Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), business excellence, lean thinking, six sigma, etc. in continuation with this, in today's business environment, the conformation and application of standardized quality management system models such as ISO 9000 and TQM are vitally considered to be one of the most important phenomena in total quality management development and globalization (Dale et al., 2001; Ruzevicius et al., 2004). TQM and quality management system implementation has had the highest positive impact on the quality improvement of companies' operations and products (Adomaitiene and Ruzevicius, 1999). In the light of this, it is vital for organizations to develop or adopt an effective quality management system such as ISO 9000, which combines also the main TQM principles (Rohitratana and Boon-Itt, 2001). ISO 9000 is one of the most influential initiatives that grew from the quality movement of the 1980s (Poksinska et al., 2002), and one of the most frequently company implemented strategies concerning quality across the world (ISO, 2006). Moreover, ISO 9000 has become a subject of focus in many developing countries, including India. The literature review offers many diverse opinions on ISO 9000 in different countries but little empirical research has been carried out in India concerning ISO implementation issues. In more specific, the current study attempts to find out the applicability of ISO 9000 to Indian manufacturing organizations, which were successful in obtaining ISO registration. It specifically compares the two stages pre-implementation and post implementation. The current study provides reasons and cause which effect the decision making process in relation to the implementation. In addition, the study will attempt to shed some light on the associated problems with the certification system in India. Therefore, it is important to study some of the issues concerning the implementation of the standard in order to make the ISO 9000 system more effective in quality improvement. This paper aims to assess empirically ISO 9001 implementations in India. The results of this study are useful for further improvement of quality management practice and interesting for practitioners and academia who are interested with the current situation of ISO 9000 in India. Background The International Organization of Standardization at Geneva established ISO 9000. The term ISO 9000 refers to a set of quality management standards. Its origin is in earlier British Standards (BS 5750). It was established in 1947 to develop common international standards in many areas. Its members come from over 120 national standards bodies. The International Organization of Standardization with the involvement of American National Standard Institute (ANSI) formed a technical committee (TC 176) to develop a generic worldwide standard for general application in 1979. It published the ISO 9000 standards in 1987. The ISO 9000 standards were revised in 1994 and 2000. The three versions of the standards i.e. ISO 9001, ISO 9002 and ISO 9003 were integrated into a single norm called ISO 9001:2000. This standard is valid for any organization. Up to 2003, the three previous standards and the new one co-existed, thus giving time to certified companies to adopt quality systems to the requirements of new version. From year 2004, all companies had to follow ISO 9001:2000 for certification. ISO 9000 currently includes three quality standards: ISO 9000:2000, ISO 9001:2000, and ISO 9004:2000. ISO 9001:2000 presents requirements, while ISO 9000:2000 and ISO 9004:2000 present guidelines. Following a meeting of ISO's Technical Committee TC176 in Helsinki, Finland, from June 11th--15th 2007, publication of the new version of ISO 9001 has been brought forward from 2009 and is now scheduled to be published in August 2008. …