ISO 9001: 2000 For Small Businesses

ISO9001 Implementation Guide

We are a small LLC corporation, a medical device testing lab, and have found Mr. Tricker's book to be quite straightforward and helpful. The detailed examples and sample QMS it provides helped us immensely and enabled us to implement our own QMS in-house, saving us a great deal of expense and time.
Relatively easy reading and not as opaque and intimidating as some other sources I've seen.
Thanks, Ray!

Good Reading

The book ISO 9001: 2000 for Small Businesses, is excellent reading. It is very helpful for smaller organizations trying to implement ISO, I am in the process of doing the same. However I think the author does not give enough emphasis on the flexibility of the new standard, neither give clues on how implementing the standard is going to help the organization function better. The Sample quality manual is helpful, I would not go as far as using it as a template and customizing it, because it will effectively translate into tricking your own self (The standard was envisioned to help give companies a tool to work better, and is very flexible/generic to help tailor it to ones own needs). But it is an excellent starting point for novice implementers of any QMS, to understand what a QMS looks like when its ready. The documentation is brief and covers most of the clauses in a structured manner. All things considered I think the book is good quality :)

Accessible to the novice and easy to read.

My organization has decided to become ISO 9001:2000 compliant. This is of course a necessity for a midsized consultancy that is growing by leaps and bounds. Having read two books before this one I can say that this book is accessible to novices and provides the necessary direction.

In addition to the accessibility, this book is a must read for those businesses that are not large corporations with a QMS of some sort already in place.

Not all that it says it is

Much of the book's explanation of the standard is pretty much a repetition of the words stated in the standard itself so it doesn't add much value and can be quite confusing at times.

The author also fails to explain some very important points of the standard. One example are the clauses on product "verification" and product "validation". These two terms have very different meanings in the standard. The book fails to explain their differences as well as their exact purpose.

I also noticed a number of typos in the text. There is a section in one of the later chapters of the book that, I believe, was not updated because it still used the word "Supplier" when it meant "Organization".

As for the free quality manual, I would not recommend using it. It does not apply for small businesses and the structure is not that comprehendible. The scary part about this is that the author went as far as saying the reader can immediately use the free quality manual by just replacing the sample company name with the reader's own! That sounds a lot like a get-rich-overnight scheme. It never works. You'll have satisfied ISO 9001:2000's requirement to document your procedures, but as for its requirement to implement and maintain it...I highly doubt that's going to happen if you use the sample manual as is.

I'd go for ISO 9001:2000 explained (second edition). Apart from the fact that the authors were members of the group who actually made the standard, the text is very clear and easily understood.

User-friendly intro to ISO

After the canonical brief history of ISO and where ISO 9000 came from, Mr. Tricker walks the reader through the standard. He gives a friendly treatment to material that is often presented, at least in other books I've read, in a pedantic way. The book introduces the clauses in the standard's order, then explains them, in a conversational, accessible tone.
The book also includes a quality manual, sample procedures and work instructions. I can only speak for myself, but this is what got the standard to "click" for me. Reading the ISO clauses and interpretations was fine, but when it came time to write my own manual, I found myself floundering. Seeing how Mr. Tricker applied the standard for his own consultancy was invaluable. The manual, procedures and work instructions were all in one section, and not dispersed throughout the book as examples, which added to the book's utility. A great reference book