ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board Marks 20 Years of Accredited Management Systems Certification

To fully understand how the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board - originally as the Registrar Accreditation Board - came to be, you have to go back to 1957 when a group of countries agreed to form the European Economic Community, in hopes of increasing economic cooperation and decreasing the likelihood of war. Although Europe had a grand vision, little happened initially in terms of implementing meaningful cooperation.

The next significant event in our chronology took place in 1970. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), whose mission was to put in place product standards, recognized there was another aspect to international standardization: mechanisms for evaluating conformance with standards. Consequently, ISO's Certification Committee (CERTICO) was formed to establish a process to increase confidence that products were being manufactured in conformance with standards.

Four major events occurred in 1979: ISO Technical Committee 176 on Quality Management and Quality Assurance was established. In the United Kingdom, BS 5750 was published as a series of three quality assurance standards. Z299, similar to BS 5750 but numbering four rather than three standards, was published in Canada. And in the United States, the quality management system standard ANSI-ASQC Z1.15 was published.

In spite of the publication of these quality assurance and quality management standards, product quality continued to fall short and the complexity of OEM certifications was driving up costs. In the United Kingdom, the government-sanctioned white paper "Standards, Quality, and International Competitiveness," published in 1982, noted that international competitiveness would be improved if the UK had systems in place to improve product quality. A UK national quality campaign the following year addressed some of the issues raised in the paper.

Another seminal event in 1983 was CERTICO's publication of ISO/IEC Guide 40, General Requirements for the Acceptance of Certification Bodies. Guide 40 specified how to assess an organization engaged in product certification and was a precursor to guidance that would be used in quality management.

Two years later, ISO recognized that conformity assessment dealt with more than product certification and replaced CERTICO with the Conformity Assessment Committee (CASCO).

Progress Follows Frustration in Europe

By 1985, the group then known as the European Community (EC) was frustrated about the lack of progress toward achieving the "single internal market" that was envisioned in 1957. A white paper titled "Completing the Internal Market"  identified the specific tasks that must be completed to remove physical, technical, and fiscal barriers to trade. A timetable was established for completing the hundreds of tasks identified as necessary to reach the goal of a  "single internal market" in 1992.  In a classic example of a Deming approach, a system was set up to manage the list of tasks and tick off each as it was completed. This massive intellectual undertaking finally got the EC moving on the path of cooperation.

CASCO published ISO/IEC Guide 48, Guidelines for Third-Party Assessment and Registration of a Supplier's Quality System, in 1986. It dealt with how assessment bodies that evaluate organizations' quality systems should operate. The following year, the ISO 9000 series standards were published. Remarkably, before 1987 ended, BS 5750 was revised to adopt verbatim the ISO 9000 series, and the ISO standards were adopted as the ANSI-ASQC Q90 series standards in the United States and as the EN 29000 series by CEN and CENELEC, the European committees for standardization.

Also in 1987, each of the EC states formally adopted the Single European Act, which included a commitment to form a single internal market by the end of 1992. The EC nations recognized that to realize their vision, there had to be free movement of goods, capital, and people among all of the member states. Naturally, states with highly developed product standards and certification programs didn't want to allow goods in from countries with less sophisticated systems. The EC hoped CEN and CENELEC could sort things out and develop a single standard for each product that would be acceptable to all, but eventually realized this was unlikely.

A breakthrough came when it was agreed that the real areas of concern had to do with health, safety, and the environment. What was needed, therefore, was standards that defined the essential requirements for health, safety, and the environment that would be acceptable for use anywhere within the EC.

Under this "new approach," to market a product, it would be necessary to demonstrate that the product met all of the essential requirements. How this would be done would depend on the product. For every class of product, the EC established a ranking of methods by which a product could be considered to be acceptable, from a manufacturer's self-declaration of conformity through 100% product testing.

Among other methods, this included demonstrating that the design of a product met requirements and that the manufacturing system gave assurance that it would be produced according to the design. One method for demonstrating the latter was if the system met the appropriate ISO 9000 standard.

Next: The U.S. Response