Isn't that possibly part of the problem though? These are not electronics companies, they're boiler manufacturers. Maybe they'll employ a couple of EE's at best, or the design may well be sub'ed out. The manufacture of the PCB's likely goes to the cheapest CEM they can find. There may well simply not be the skills necessary to understand the issues of hi-rel with in the company. Hence the high incidence of boiler "PCB" failures we hear about in this ng.
As an example, the company I work for, as well as designing and make lots of our own stuff, have a nice side-line for production in building PCB's a third party. Said party take the PCB's and fit them into their electro-mehanical assembly. Said party has absolutely zero knowledge of electronics, and frankly just don't want to know about any technical issues. PCB was designed by a.n.other one-man-band contractor. Muggins here spent weeks ironing out their reliability bugs to reduce _our_ cost of product returns. A new design turns up for a pre-production run, we have to turn round and tell them to go away and correct all the _same_ bugs we've just fixed and told them about on the old design.
As one of the unhappy people saddled with writing and agreeing the BS9000 crap, I KNOW that a BS/ISO9000 quality standard is not worth the hot air and paper that surrounds it. It was originally set up as a MIL spec to provide traceability for the US space program, but proved too expensive to continue without being made toothless. Reliable products stem from a "won't fail" philosophy which pervades the whole design and manufacturing process. The Japanese generally have this, to some extent the Germans also, but they don't start from an ISO9000 specification and hope to achieve it, they design the product and it will normally automatically pass any 9000 series requirements. Guess whose products have the best general track records?! (AND customer satisfaction). The Chinese are coming up fast. The better design and build operators can equal almost anything the West can do, reliably and much, much cheaper. I've seen a few large companies which have this philosophy in the US and the UK, but most of them have now ceased manufacturing their own products and buy in to their own specifications which are much higher than 9000. A lot of small companies locally who make a good product are finding that they must have ISO9000 certification to sell the product and the paper work + labour costs are putting them out of business. The business then goes offshore, never to return!
The most damning inditement of the whole QA process was the comment by a MOD QA man who said to me "When did you last see a military product which worked correctly!"
I think I'd consider a condensing boiler if the Japanese built them, until then, it's far cheaper to keep my reliable piece of cast iron.
Some of the industry still couldn't care a damn. Many people with terrestrial digital television know that certain cars will kill their reception when driven close by. In my experience, and ignoring the poorly maintain ten year old cars, the main culprits appear to be new large people carriers bearing a far eastern manufacturers name :(.
I'm not going to try and defend it, but it is completely misunderstood. Getting certified is about having procedures in place, and documented and followed. Well, just about every company has procedures in place which amounts to what it does in its day-to-day work. All that's normally required is that these be documented. You can document that you chuck all customer complaints in the waste bin, don't answer the phone until at least 25 rings, don't pay suppliers for 180 days, whatever... Just make sure you stick to it and keep enough records to show this, and you can become ISO certified. That doesn't have to cost a fortune.
What I often see companies doing is hiring in a Quality Consultant (that's Quality as a noun, definately not an adjective as you'll see). What turns up is a middle manager who lost his job on the early 1990's, and discovered he could sell himself as a Quality Consultant, because even though he had no clue what that was, neither did any of his clients. Now as a consultant, his primary task is to make his job last as long as possible. That in itself is clearly expensive to the company, but the ultimate aim is to persuade the company that quality is an ongoing thing (which is true) so they'll need to retain his services for the forseeable future (which is pointless as he's clueless, but so are they). Now he needs to be seen to be doing something, so he will start going round the company and interfering (more cost), changing processes so management can see he's having an effect. Sometimes the consultant is actually so completely clueless about getting certified, that this stage just goes on forever, with the company getting more tangled up in pointless process, whilst the consultant keeps claiming the company is not yet ready. Other times, the consultant might actually manage to get certification.
If you want to obtain ISO qualification, start by documenting what you already do, without changing anything. This is a good time to look at what you documented to see if there's anything silly (there often is) and think about fixing that, but it's not normally required that you turn the company upside down by changing just about all processes. If you are aiming to improve the quality of some aspect of your company, then you can tackle it at this stage. The other thing you need to do is to keep sufficient records to later show that you are keeping to the procedures you documented.
If you are interested in working with other companies who are ISO certified, then the certificate itself is worthless. What you need to do is have a read of their Quality Manual, so you can check what it says about how long they take to pay their suppliers, or whatever aspects are particularly relevant to you.
My recollection when I first came across it (BS5750 at the time), was that it came out of the GPO. This later morphed into the ISO9000 series. Military work had its own quite separate standards from what I recall.
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