History of Quality AUDIT

Historical perspective of quality audit

The term of quality audits were cited in the first edition of “Quality Control Handbook” (Juran, 1951). Juran describe the quality audit as part of quality assurance process. Since then, the quality audit terms have been used extensively a in various publication and quality audit had been implemented either formally or informally by organization and government agencies.

In 1975 at the meeting of the ASQC's General Technical Council (GTC) administrative committee, a new steering committee on quality auditing was established and given the responsibility to explore quality auditing as a potentially major segment of the society's technical program (Campbell, 1996). Whereas, the systematic implementation of quality audit started with the birth of quality standard. Even previously there are several quality standards develop by government and customers, the first formal quality management standard was established 1979 by British Standard Institute named as BS5750. The standard set the requirements for quality management. One of the main requirements was to conduct quality audit. In 1987, the BS 5750 British Standard was revised and was adopted as the ISO 9000 international standards (Franceschini et al., 2006). Since introduction of ISO9001 in 1987, various study on quality audit were conducted and framework presented.

While the certification of quality auditors was being initiated in 1984. ASQC work began on developing a certification exam. In 1986 the committee issued Generic Guidelines for Auditing of Quality Systems and developed an authoritative set of audit definitions. In 1987, 28 members of the Quality Auditing Technical Committee (QATC) took a pilot exam. Later, several volunteering local sections also took the exam. Based on the success of these pilots, the Society formally adopted the Certified Quality Auditor Program.