By Paul Scicchitano

Drafters of the ISO 9001 quality requirements have for the foreseeable future shelved a possible return to the tiered approach that once gave companies a choice of multiple certification standards, depending upon whether or not they were responsible for designing their products and services.

Nigel Croft, who chairs Subcommittee 2 (SC2) of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 176 (TC 176), which will be responsible for carrying out any future drafting work through a consensus process, tells Sustainable Success Alert that the committee surveyed nearly 12,000 users around the world between late 2010 and February 2011 on the types of changes that they would like to see in the next iteration of the best-selling voluntary standards.

“We’re pretty sure on what the market doesn’t want and they don’t want a return to three standards,” explains Croft. “That option was not supported in the user survey. There was some indication of support for a maturity level model based on a single standard.”

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