In 2017, much of the ISO standards user community, as well as the supporting third party certification industry, was left with the same question. What standards/specifications aren’t changing right now? ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 13485, AS9100-series and ISO/TS 16949 documents have all undergone structure revisions and are already moving rapidly into user adoption, and finally supporting certification phases. When these types of changes happen, users are always left scrambling, counting the number of shalls (again) or trying to get their hands on appropriate “delta” matrices but often are some of the underlining theme changes—which organizations ultimately need to know—are missed. This article will focus on some of these underlining theme changes with specifically the ISO 9001:2015 (previous ISO 9001:2008), AS9100D (previous AS9100C) and IATF 16949:2016 (previous ISO/TS 16949:2009) standards.

By its very clause structure (as defined in Annex A), ISO 9001:2015 users are now introduced to a 10-clause versus the previous eight-clause supporting outline. As users adapt to this change in standard structure, there are three important themes to focus on, including organizational context, top management ownership and risk-based thinking.