ISO 9001 – No Revision in the Near Future

The world’s most widely used standard for quality management systems, ISO 9001:2015, will not undergo revision for the time being. This was announced by the technical committee ISO/TC 176/SC 2 on its website. Accordingly, in a vote within the committee, the recommendation of the review group to confirm the standard for quality management unchanged was accepted.

The Strategic Planning and Operations Task Group (SPOTG), which is responsible for the systematic review of the QM standard, has submitted three recommendations on ISO 9001:2015 to the technical committee ISO/TC 176/SC 2:

1. ISO 9001 should be endorsed without change.
2. A preliminary project should consider whether a future revision of ISO 9001 should occur earlier than the systematic review process (every five years) would specify.
3. A more extensive review of the SC2 standards portfolio is to be conducted by SPOTG and coordinated with the work of ISO/TC 176/Chair’s Strategic Advisory Group (CSAG) and the preliminary project on ISO 9001.

The members of the SC2 Technical Committee have now confirmed the recommendations of the SPOTG Expert Group and have thus determined that there will be no revision of IS0 9001 in the near future.

To ensure currency, ISO standards are reviewed every five years; if a need is identified, a revision of the corresponding standard is decided. In accordance with this review cycle, IS0:9001, the last major revision of which took place in 2015, was again put to the test in 2020 and subjected to a systematic review. The Strategic Planning and Operations Task Group (SPOTG) of the ISO Technical Committee ISO/TC176, Subcommittee SC2, was in charge. As a result of the systematic review, 36 members of the SPOTG voted to confirm the ISO 9001 standard without change, while there were also 32 votes in favor of a revision.

In a public survey, the people who work with ISO 9001 on a daily basis then had their say: the quality representatives of companies. Until December 31, 2020, wishes regarding a revision of the quality management standard could be expressed. Apparently – as the above-mentioned SPOTG recommendations suggest – this survey confirmed the tendency of the systematic review to refrain from revising the standard at present.

These recommendations were then sent to all members of Subcommittee 2 for a one-month balloting period. On May 1, 2021, the voting was closed and the recommendations were accepted – according to the German Society for Quality (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Qualität) with a large majority.

However, since the resolution on an unchanged confirmation of ISO 9001 also provides for a broad review of the 9000 and 10000 standards as well as an early re-examination on revision for ISO 9001, the topic of standard revision in quality management is likely to come up again in the next few years.