My Story with the Quality Assurance Standard ISO 9000

In 1992 I was working in the Middle East with one of the groups that was connected with technology and OFFSET program programs. The industry was my main client in the business practice I was engaged in. The quality standards at that time had serious problems in maintaining the specs in every product batch that came out for sales across all sectors was.

?

I started looking for a solution and found a reasonable one in the British Standard 5750 for quality assurance. BS5750 is the British Standard on "Quality Systems". Its equivalent in European Standards that evolved years later is EN29000 and in the International Standards Organisation ISO9000. However, the truth is that BS5750 standards laid down the need to document the formalised procedures and require documentation but did not necessarily lead to quality assurance.

?

Therefore, I contacted the British Standards Institute in 1993 to find a solution for the quality standard, whereby we can have one that will lead to continuous quality improvement and ensure its sustainability. Luckily, we found the answer and the total quality management (TQM) principles and techniques.

?

One of the university professors who studied in the United States of America had arrived back to Amman, to begin teaching in the industrial engineering faculty. With him, he brought a small booklet developed by the Department of National Defence of the American Army, that discusses quality assurance techniques. It was in a poor Xerox condition. We took that booklet and reproduced it again to become presentable. It was a short concise and complete guideline for quality assurance.

?

The building blocks of a new quality system are finally in our hands:

1.???????? BS 5750

2.???????? The basic principles of TQM

3.???????? The DND quality assurance booklet.

?

Mr. David arrived from London for the first quality assurance conference that we held in March 1993 together with UNDP, UN-ESCWA, BS, and the Ministry of Industry. We brought together in that event more than 150 people under one roof for the first time in Jordan. The only subject was quality improvement.

?

I shared my thoughts with David who was the leading authority on the BS 5750. David was convinced that it was a no-brainer to see that documenting. The procedure of manufacturing will not necessarily lead to quality improvement. There is much more to improve the quality and create a quality culture inside the organization that embraces TQM for continuous quality improvement.

?

To create that culture, we had to introduce Total Quality Management and the techniques that are associated with quality assurance, such as the Fishbone method, statistics and analysis, etc. He found our ways very convincing, and he took them with him on his way to Hong Kong, but he was heading for another conference on quality assurance.

?

From Hong Kong, under the UK flag at that time, and later in Vancouver and Montreal in Canada the ISO standards started to evolve to become a very unique quality assurance system. Much of these principles were shared with the Sigma quality systems in North America.

?

In the early 1990s, we didn’t have the Internet and email systems at our fingertips. That made our work a little challenging in communication and getting things done fast enough. However, that never stopped us from improving the working environment with all the tools that we had. We never were short on will, dedication, or determination. We had plenty of that. And when we knew the tools, we used them effectively and efficiently to make the world a better place.

This is the moral of the story that I wish to share with the young generation.

?

?