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first International Organization for Standardization(ISO) technical specification.

The International Automotive Task Force (IATF)and the Japanese Automobile Manufacturers Assn.(JAMA) produced TS 16949 with support from ISOTechnical Committee 176 (TC 176), the ISO commit-tee that deals with quality management standards.

QS-9000 MorphsTS 16949 evolved from the DaimlerChrysler, Ford

and General Motors (GM) quality system require-ments (QS-9000) and the quality system assessment(QSA) manuals released in August 1994.

Large sections of QS-9000 text (outside of the ISO9001:1994 text) are still recognizable in TS 16949.Surprisingly, QS-9000 was not a DaimlerChrysler,Ford or GM idea. Actually, the automotive suppli-ers suggested it in a June 1988 ASQ AutomotiveDivision conference with the Big Three automakers’purchasing vice presidents.

Where We Were

By the mid-1980s, suppliers were subject tonumerous military, national and customer stan-dards. Large automotive suppliers dedicated full-time employees to each customer account just toaddress the varying customer quality requirements.

For tier two suppliers—those who sell to a tierone supplier—the situation was worse. They weresubject to numerous unique tier one supplier quali-ty standards, which also included the standards of the final customer. Furthermore, tier two supplierstypically have fewer resources for dealing withvariation than tier one suppliers have.

In 1987, the ISO 9000 family of QMS standardswas released. Its use promoted the use of consistentquality terminology internationally and resulted insignificant harmonization. The standards were slowto take root in the United States, however.

The Big Three elected to use the ISO 9001 stan-dard as the base for QS-9000, mainly because therewas a widespread rumor at the time that companieswould have to be ISO 9000 certified by the mid-1990s to do business in Europe.

While nothing in ISO 9000 was objectionable tothe Big Three, it lacked some elements in currentautomotive industry documents, such as businessplans, customer satisfaction, continuous improve-

ment, manufacturing capabilities and much of theadvanced quality planning content.

Adding to Supplier ProfitsThe benefits of QS-9000 have been documented.

A 1998 ASQ/Automotive Industry Action Group(AIAG) survey of more than 200 suppliers reportedthe average cost of QS-9000 registration to be about$120,000.1

All but $20,000 paid by the supplier to the certifi-

cation body—17% of the total reported cost—turnedout to be discretionary cost on the part of the suppli-er, such as for consultants or training. The averagesales of the survey respondents was $130 million,and they reported an average savings of 6% of salesas a result of the QS-9000 registration, which isabout $8 million per company.

This 1998 survey also correlated greatly with the1997 version of the same survey, which had morethan 600 respondents. 2 That survey indicated a 3-to-1 return on total costs and almost 17-to-1 returnon certification body fees. In addition, about half

the suppliers improved their parts per milliondefect rates by about 50%.

This contrasts with the benefits of ISO 9000. In a1999 McGraw-Hill ISO 9000 survey with more than1,100 respondents, the average total cost of ISO 9000registration was reported to be $156,000, with anaverage total savings of $187,000, or a savings-to-cost ratio of only 1.2-to-1. 3 Less than 19% reportedtheir defect rate was significantly improving and of these, only one-third reported the improvement wasattributable to the ISO 9000 registration to a high orvery high extent.

The difference in quality improvement and sav-ings between QS-9000 and the ISO 9000 scheme isprimarily due to the additional sector specificrequirements and process controls imposed on thethird-party registration system—for example, QS-9000 appendixes B, G, H and I.

Interest in adopting QS-9000 within the BigThree original equipment manufacturers (OEMs)globally was high from the beginning. To accom-modate the international rollout, the second edi-tion of QS-9000 was released in February 1995.

The second edition was the first version to bedeployed by OEMs worldwide. This required thetranslation of the requirements, certification scheme

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information and training materials into several lan-guages, including German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese.

Global Standardization LaunchedIn May 1995, during a QS-9000 rollout meeting

in Europe for suppliers and certification bodies,representatives of the European automotive OEMsapproached the task force to point out similar har-monization efforts had already been undertaken in

Europe. In fact, there were already three nationalautomotive supplier quality requirements manualsin Europe: VDA 6.1 in Germany, AVSQ in Italy andEAQF in France. QS-9000 was now a fourth. As aresult of this discussion, it was agreed additionalharmonization should be pursued for the benefit of the shared supply base.

In Italy, Fiat Auto, IVECO (a truck and enginemanufacturer) and 16 primary suppliers represent-ing 85 suppliers in total had worked on AVSQ.In France, Renault and PSA, which consists of Peugeot and Citroen, teamed with FIEV, the French

automotive supplier association, and four primarysuppliers representing some 300 suppliers in total,to publish EAQF.

In Germany, Adam Opel, Audi, BMW, DaimlerBenz, Ford Werke and VW worked with their auto-motive trade association, VDA, and 18 primarysuppliers representing some 500 total suppliers inthe development of VDA 6.1, one of a number of common manuals in the VDA 6 family of qualitydocuments. VDA 6.1 has been translated into sev-eral languages and has been deployed internation-ally, as has QS-9000.

Extensive efforts were undertaken early in theprocess to identify where the content of the docu-ments was similar and where it differed. Much of this effort involved translation of the documents intoEnglish, the only language common to the group.

When these manuals and QS-9000 were compared,they were all found to be remarkably similar. Mostdifferences were in areas of emphasis and in theamount of guidance included with the requirements.

The most significant differences were in the meth-ods of determining conformance to the requirements.The European approaches were based on second-party (customer/supplier) audits, with a generalagreement for reciprocal recognition of each other’s

audits. The introduction of third-party certificationwith QS-9000 was the most revolutionary change tothe requirements or the existing process in the lastfew decades.

Subsequent meetings of the U.S. and EuropeanOEMs were scheduled, and the group becameknown as the IATF.

Migration to ISO 9000The international launch of QS-9000 was also

being noted by ISO member bodies and TC 176. InNovember 1995, ISO TC 176 chair Reg Shaughnessycontacted the task force as a follow-up to a TC 176resolution passed in the ISO TC 176 plenary meet-

ing in Durban, South Africa.In this annual meeting, TC 176 resolved to

undertake efforts to avoid proliferation of sectorspecific standards such as QS-9000 by investigatingcollaborative efforts with the automotive group.The aim was to convince the automotive group toadopt the use of ISO 9001. This was consistent withthe ISO directives at the time concerning sectorspecific requirements.

There were several additional meetings andnumerous communications before the next ISO TC176 plenary in Tel Aviv, Israel, in November 1996,to explore the possibilities of collaborative efforts.It was soon apparent to all that the ISO 9001:1994

Actually, the automotive

suppliers suggestedQS-9000 in a June 1988ASQ Automotive Divisionconference with the BigThree automakers’purchasing vice presidents.


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pilot progressed rapidly based on the IATF workalready done, using the third edition of QS-9000 asthe baseline.

The Japanese OEM affiliates in the UnitedKingdom had considered adopting QS-9000 someyears earlier as part of the UK automotive tradeassociation, the Society of Motor Manufacturersand Traders (SMMT).

At that time, SMMT stopped short of endorse-ment and use of QS-9000 over some terminology

differences. The Japanese OEMs had indicated QS-9000 was not particularly objectionable, but ratherthat their process was different. In fact, Toyota’sNorth American operation issued a supplier quali-ty manual several years ago telling suppliers to usetechniques from the Big Three supplier quality ref-erence manuals covering issues such as failuremode and effects analysis (FMEA) and measure-ment systems analysis.

ISO/TS 16949 ReleasedThe draft document was balloted by TC 176 in

the third quarter of 1998 and approved for release.During the ballot, ISO’s central secretariat notedavailability of a new document type in the ISOportfolio, TS, if IATF wanted to use that categoryrather than the existing technical report category.

This was supported, and in November 1998,ISO/TS 16949 was released as the first ISO/TS.IATF said ISO/TS 16949 would be an optional doc-ument for automotive suppliers to use to satisfyexisting customer certification requirements.

Automotive Certification

ReengineeredA new feature incorporated into the IATF recog-

nized certification scheme for TS 16949 is the selec-tion and contracting of approved certification bodies by IATF oversight bodies in the UnitedStates and Europe. Capacity for third-party certifi-cation to QS-9000 far exceeded the global demand,so this provided the IATF an opportunity to notonly align global capacity with demand but alsoupgrade global audit competency at the same time.

This contract gives IATF members a mechanismto revoke the TS 16949 qualification of certification bodies whose performance proves unacceptable.Examples of this could be failing to abide by IATF

rules for the TS 16949 certification scheme or main-taining the certification of companies who chroni-cally ship poor quality product to their customers.

This contract replaces the oversight function per-formed by national accreditation bodies under pre-vious automotive certification schemes.

Alignment With ISO 9000:2000Over the past few years, participating automak-

ers have been migrating to the TS 16949:2002 edi-

tion as their requirements document, opting to addcustomer specific requirements as applicable.

The current edition maintains most of the contentof the initial edition but uses the ISO 9001:2000 stan-dard as the foundation. The new ISO 9001 abandonsthe previous 20-element format for an eight-sectionformat more like the Malcolm Baldrige NationalQuality Award criteria—a process driven approach.

ISO 9001:2000 requires the organization to identifythe processes needed for the system and determinethe sequence and interaction of these processes (ISO9001:2000, clause 4.1). This requirement is subject to

internal and third-party auditing as well as havingthe products and processes meet customer specifiedrequirements.

Organizations should then map their processesto the current TS 16949 requirements to ensure allare adequately addressed. Organizations that have been fully compliant to the intent of QS-9000 or thefirst edition of TS 16949 should be able to upgradein a surveillance audit.

There is now additional emphasis on contentrelated to meeting specific customer satisfactionrequirements, which include:

• Delivered part quality performance.• Customer disruptions (including field returns).• Delivery schedule performance (including

incidents of premium freight).• Customer notifications related to quality or

delivery issues. 4

Another key generic QMS requirement of theautomotive industry is the control of process design.ISO 9001:2000 addresses product design and devel-opment but completely ignores process design anddevelopment. This subject has been given signifi-cant treatment in the automotive OEM referencemanuals and now in TS 16949, but the new editionlimits the subject to manufacturing processes.


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What Could Go Wrong?For many years, there have been some chronic

implementation problems with TS 16949 that orga-nizations and auditors should be aware of. Some of these problems are:

• Characteristic management.• Production part approval process (PPAP).• Control plans.• Error proofing.• Work instructions and training.• Management representative empowerment.• IATF approved certification body.Characteristic management. Automakers define

at least two types of product characteristics: standardand key/critical/significant. QS-9000 and ISO/TS16949 use the term “special” to harmonize the vari-ous company specific terms in use for the latter type.

ISO/TS 16949 defines a special characteristic as being a product characteristic or manufacturingprocess parameter that can affect safety or compli-ance with regulations, fit, function, performance orsubsequent processing of product. 5

These characteristics require extra care to miti-gate the effects of a potential problem. The types of controls necessary are customer specific. TS 16949emphasizes it is a joint responsibility of the cus-tomer and supplier organizations to identify anddesignate special characteristics, even for cus-tomer-responsible designed parts.

In some cases the suppliers are the only partiesin a position to identify some special characteristics because of their unique knowledge of their produc-tion processes. If a supplier organization takes aminimalist approach to the identification and des-ignation of special characteristics, the customerstands to lose much of the power of the ISO/TS16949 specified quality planning and control toolssuch as FMEAs, control plans, work instructionsand standard operating procedures.

PPAP requires only that initial process studies beperformed for special characteristics. This assumesspecial characteristics have been properly identi-fied and designated by both the customer and sup-plier, which may be a bad assumption. Incompleteor inadequate FMEAs can compromise the properidentification of special characteristics and thusimpact the effectiveness of this part qualificationactivity. The result is the risk an end user finds the

problem in the field, which likely would generatecustomer dissatisfaction and possibly warranty orrecall exposure.

PPAP. PPAP was a common Big Three require-ment predating QS-9000. About 15 items must becompleted for each PPAP (third edition) approval,regardless of how much evidence the customerrequests from the organization to ensure the itemshave, in fact, been completed.

For example, the customer may request only aPPAP source warrant (PPAP level one submission).The warrant is a record to certify the other PPAPrequirements have been completed with no noncon-formance found except as is noted on the warrant.

Organizations may not have all the necessaryPPAP documentation or records as required whenaudited, despite the intent of the warrant form.Third-party auditors should cite this as a noncon-formance.

Further, the organization is to notify the customerwhen the product or process changes from the lastPPAP approved process. A significant quality prob-lem can result when changes have not been commu-nicated to the OEM customer. These changes couldactually occur at a tier two or lower level in the sup-ply chain as well as within a tier one supplyingorganization.

Control plans. Control plans are one of the keydeliverables of the automotive quality planningprocess. Controlled characteristics, including allspecial characteristics, are to be documented in thecontrol plan (TS 16949:2002, clause 8.5.1.2).

Too often, control plans are not developed with amultidisciplinary process (TS 16949, clause 7.3.1.1)and are not current relative to the process they areto control, such as gage or device numbers, inspec-tion frequency or location. The control plan should

be up-to-date and representative of the process.Operators should have input into the control plandevelopment to ensure applicability. Further, whenproven effective controls are in place, these should

be deployed to similar processes and control plansacross the organization.

Error proofing. Despite published material nowavailable regarding error proofing methodology,the subject is still not well deployed in the automo-tive supply chain considering its value and poten-tial. W. Edwards Deming pointed out in his famous

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14 points that management should cease depen-dence on inspection to cause quality to happen. 6

Problems must be prevented, and error proofingprovides an ideal solution when applicable.

Work instructions and training. As organizationscontinue to cut discretionary costs, one area typicallyaffected is training. Yet, as technology and customerexpectations increase, this area should be carefullymanaged to ensure competency of workers.

Typically work instructions document the pro-cess to be followed and exclude direction for theworker regarding what action to take when thingsgo wrong. This direction should be referenced onthe control plan it applies to where applicable.

Management representative empowerment.Clause 5.5.2 of ISO 9001:2000 requires the manage-ment representative to have responsibility andauthority to establish, implement and maintain theentire QMS.

For organizations with product design responsibility, this would have to be a senior executive. Toooften, however, organizations delegate this require-ment to a position that lacks the necessary crossfunctional empowerment to comply. This is not citedas a major nonconformance in third-party audits,compromising the effectiveness of the system.

IATF approved certification body. While thereare many QS-9000 certification bodies, there are alimited number of IATF approved certification bodies. If you have a customer requirement to beTS 16949 certified, you should verify you use anIATF approved and qualified certification body.

What’s Next?

It is unlikely ISO 9000 or any subsequent volun-tary management system standard with enoughcontent to be used as is by industry sectors willever be agreed on by ISO. Too many ISO commit-tee members favor a minimalist approach for theinternational standards, and many companies arenot willing or able to fund the resources necessaryto work with ISO to make a difference.

Fortunately, there is significant global consensusin the automotive sector on the fundamental quali-ty requirements in TS 16949. These requirementshave been fairly stable for the last 10 or more years.This makes the task of maintaining the standardfairly easy, as it was with the TS 16949 revision.

Future editions will just need to “cut and paste”the existing requirements around the new ISOstandard’s outline.

However, using future revisions of TS 16949 asan opportunity to raise the bar will likely result insome new content being introduced, but it should be evolutionary. As long as the standard continues

to be ISO based, it will be on a five-year revisioncycle. This all suggests there will continue to be alengthy period of stability of the fundamental sup-plier quality requirements for automotive OEMs.

The challenge facing automotive suppliers duringthis period will be dealing with additional companyspecific requirements and initiatives being driven bya fiercely competitive global environment. The faceof these requirements may not yet be revealed, butthey will likely not be standards based because thereis insufficient time to build consensus.

Third-party certification will likely continue fornow, but OEMs will not depend on certificationalone to ensure purchased part quality. Third-partycertification will likely migrate to become the ticketto get into the game, but expect OEM specific ini-tiatives as supplementary to provide the necessarycustomer assurances going forward.

NOTE

This article is based on the author’s previously pub-lished material in the ASQ ISO 9000:2000 Handbook , chapter

Fortunately, there issignificant global consensusin the automotive sector onthe fundamental qualityrequirements in TS 16949.


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48 (ASQ Quality Press, 2001) and in Quality Progress ’ “Stan-dards Outlook” columns of April 2000, January 2002 andNovember 2003.

R E F E R E N C E S

1. 1998 Annual Quality Survey Report , Automotive Indus-try Action Group (AIAG), 1998.

2. “1997 AIAG/ASQ Quality Survey Results” presented ata 1997 quality survey workshop, March 17, Novi, MI.

3. ISO 9000 Survey ’99: An Analytical Tool To Assess theCosts, Benefits and Savings of ISO 9000 Registration prepared by Quality Systems Update and Plexus Corp., McGraw-Hill,1999.

4. Technical Specification ISO/TS 16949, Quality ManagementSystems; Automotive Suppliers; Particular Requirements for the Application of ISO 9001:2000 for Automotive Production andRelevant Service Part Organizations , clause 8.2.1.1, Interna-tional Organization for Standardization, 2002.

5. Ibid, clause 3.1.12.6. W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis, MIT Press, 2000.

R. DAN REID, an ASQ Fellow and certified quality engineer,is a purchasing manager at GM Powertrain and a memberof the American College of Healthcare Executives. He is co-author of the three editions of QS-9000 and ISO/TS 16949;the Chrysler, Ford, GM Advanced Product Quality Plan-ning With Control Plan, Production Part ApprovalProcess and Potential Failure Modes and Effects Analy-sis manuals; ISO 9001:2000; and ISO IWA 1. Reid also wasthe first delegation leader of IATF.

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