Quality management: ISO 9004 gets a makeover

The voluntary ISO 9004 standard, the "little sister" of ISO 9001, has just been revised. It provides guidelines for implementing quality management with a view to achieving sustainable performance within an organization.

Like ISO 9001 in 2015, the voluntary international standard ISO 9004, one of its little sisters, has just been revamped. Orchestrated by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) Technical Committee TC 176, in which AFNOR represented France, the revision resulted in a text published in April 2018, available in the AFNOR collection here nine years after the previous version.

How does it differ from the content of the famous ISO 9001 standard, the benchmark for quality professionals worldwide? "In that it is not aimed solely at quality professionals," replies Rodolphe Civet, project manager at AFNOR Standardization, who coordinated the contributions of French stakeholders on this subject. The text provides guidelines for achieving sustainable performance over time. It is therefore more of a standard for good governance than a standard for quality management."

ISO 9004:2018: a systemic approach

Unlike ISO 9001, which addresses the quality management of products and services with a view to improving customer satisfaction, ISO 9004 offers a more general perspective on quality management with a view to improving business performance, the longer-term objective being economic survival. ISO 9004 aims to achieve this by recommending a systemic approach rather than a process-based approach. Users are encouraged to adopt it, knowing that they do not need to be familiar with or apply ISO 9001.