The draft for the new version of ISO9001 was brought to a vote until end of February 2008. In this version, ISO9001:2008, a few minor changes and amendments were added. A quite drastic change is the explicit statement that the management representative has to be chosen from the own organization. Does this mean interim quality management or outsourcing will come to an end?

I can understand the concerns of ISO about the “outsourcing” of quality management and control but I’m also afraid they added a demand that’s very hard to enforce. Such a statement leaves a lot of room for interpretation so all will depend a lot on the auditor how this will be evaluated. How will an auditor deal with a company where the official “QA Manager”, sharing this function with a lot of other functions, is assisted by an external QA Assistant (outsourcing)? Officially, the management representative is someone internal to the organization, fully complaint to the ISO9001:2008 guidelines but in reality the full quality system is set up and maintained by an external consultant.

The future will teach us how auditors will deal with this, at least if the text will be approved in full. Time will tell!