First Common Quality Standard
It was 1990. I had just be assigned to manage Supplier Development for (at that time) GM Purchasing Activities. My boss told me that GM had started to work with Ford and Chrysler on common supplier quality requirements. In the beginning, expectations surrounding automotive quality requirements harmonization were humble. A small OEM task force had been assembled and given direction “keep it small, keep it focused, and don’t spend a lot of money.” There had never been a common supplier quality document in the domestic automotive industry. Ford had Q101, upon which their Q1 supplier recognition program was based. Chrysler had their "Supplier Quality Assurance" manual. GM had standardized their North American supplier quality requirements in 1984 in "Targets for Excellence (TFE)" which was a full business standard with requirements for Quality as well as Cost, Leadership, Technology and Delivery. TFE standardized more than 20 GM divisional supplier quality manuals. As I recall, each of the OEMs were satisfied with their own company-specific approach for these requirements at the time.
There was a June 1988 ASQ Automotive Division conference where the Purchasing Vice Presidents at the time, Don Pais, Clint Lauer and Tom Stallkamp heard from a number of tier 1 suppliers who were in attendance. These supplier participants confirmed what supplier surveys of the day told us, that the supply base wanted a common quality standard from the Big 3. However, that was a ways yet into the future. There would be a series of common quality manuals first: Production Part Approval Process (PPAP), Measurement Systems Analysis (MSA), Statistical Process Control (SPC) Potential Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), and Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP).
We began discussing what a common industry quality standard might look like. At the time, it was rumored that in order to do business in Europe in the near future, an ISO 9000 certificate would be required. We examined the content of the then-current ISO 9001:1987 standard and found it lacking many automotive quality requirements, but nothing in it was particularly objectionable. Given the concern about the rumored European requirement, we began mapping the OEM requirements against ISO 9001 to prepare for an eventual decision to pursue the common standard.
Clint Lauer at Ford had stated there would likely never be a common quality standard in the domestic automotive industry. He retired shortly thereafter and was replaced by Norm Ehlers, who declared we would have one within the year. Given the pre-work completed by the Task Force, the initial draft of the standard was done in a few months time and circulated for comment within the OEMs and a small supplier council assembled under AIAG. After several iterations of review, comment and revision, the domestic auto industry was about to see the first domestic quality standard bearing more than one company logo on the cover.
I remember us meeting with the late Larry Eicher, then Central Secretariat of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and his staff in Geneva to discuss a royalty agreement for use of ISO 9000. They had quoted us a price for up to 5000 copies, which at that time was the maximum number quoted on their standard sales literature. We asked them to quote us from 100,000 copies to “unlimited”. Their body language alone led us to believe that the ISO 9000 “ship had come in” that day.
A key advantage to the OEMs in migrating to ISO 9000 was the ability to use third parties for quality system assessments which allowed them to redeploy internal resources to more value-add work such as APQP activities with suppliers. A key advantage for tier one suppliers was that a single assessment would now be recognized by most of their customers, avoiding multiple, and largely redundant audits of supplier locations. The bigger benefit was the subsequent migration of thousands of tier one supplier requirements from company-specific to the common industry requirements, giving the supply chain a common language for quality and a largely common set of fundamental requirements. Other sectors would soon see the introduction of sector-specific ISO 9000 based supplier requirements as well.
There has been a fair amount of criticism of ISO 9000 over the years, some deserved. What one must remember is that ISO 9000 is a consensus standard adopted by many countries, some of which make compliance regulatory. As with any consensus document, ISO 9001 is the “lowest common denominator” agreement of all parties. It contains only requirements that all parties “can live with” rather than being a “stretch” tool to drive world class improvement. Sector-specific documents, e.g. QS-9000, can fill this need more effectively as there are fewer players involved in reaching consensus. Also, what we discovered in development work on TS16949 with the European OEMs is that the automotive business has a lot of similarity at the fundamental quality system level. Competitive advantage seems to be more dependent on deployment and implementation.
We decided early on that an agreeable name would be “Quality System Requirements.” The early draft was called “QSR” for short, but that acronym was already taken. Initial launch was delayed until the ISO 9001:1994 version was available. Given that it was based on the ISO 9001, “QS-9000”for short was agreed. “Quality System Requirements” fit well because most of the GM TFE Cost, Leadership and Technology requirements were deleted. They remained largely absent from OEM requirements until last year when GM revised their Potential Supplier Assessment (PSA), which returned some full business assessment criteria to the traditional quality system requirements. The loss of the equity in the “QS-9000” name, now recognized globally across sectors, may be the biggest loss in the short term with the migration to an ISO document, but there is a bigger trade-off.
No sooner than QS-9000 hit the street in August 1994, the OEMs became interested in applying the new standard to their European operations. Another version was quickly prepared and released six months later for global distribution. The Chrysler, Ford and GM logos were removed from the cover and inside pages so suppliers and other OEM divisions, such as Holdens and Opel could use it with their suppliers. Changing QS-9000 requirements involved significant education and coordination among a number of trainers, certification and accreditation bodies, as well as suppliers in a number of languages, so the OEMs made a concerted effort to limit QS-9000 revisions going forward. Instead “Sanctioned Interpretations” were implemented to address popular questions during the QS-9000 launch and to minimize variation in auditors and certification bodies, which has been a concern since the launch of QS-9000.
The QS-9000 Third (and final) Edition was not released until 1998. This incorporated the sanctioned interpretations issued to date and provided for reciprocal recognition between the Big 3 and the European OEMs for the first time as an interim step on the way to the release of ISO TS-16949, the replacement standard for QS-9000.
R. Dan Reid, an ASQ Fellow and certified quality engineer, is a purchasing manager at GM Powertrain and a member of the American College of Healthcare Executives. He is co-author of the three editions of QS-9000,; ISO/TS 16949; the Chrysler, Ford, GM Advanced Product Quality Planning With Control Plan, Production Part Approval Process and Potential Failure Modes and Effects Analysis manuals; ISO 9001:2000; ISO IWA 1 and the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) HF-2 Business Operating Systems (BOS) for Health Care Organizations. Reid also was the first delegation leader of the International Automotive Task Force (IATF).
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