History of the ISO 16949 Automotive Standard

ISO 16949 and the Evolution of Automotive Quality Management Systems

The automotive industry entered the global stage with the mass-production theory advanced by Henry Ford from the early 1900s, reaching a scale that turned local manufacturing into a worldwide enterprise. In the early years, production relied on manual techniques and on skilled professionals carrying wide-ranging knowledge across electrical, mechanical, and hydraulic trades. Output was limited, barely enough to meet local demand, because there were not enough qualified people. The parts that were supposed to be identical still varied, so nothing left the supplier in a usable form. Every part had to be reworked by hand to match the required specification. That cut the pace of production and created a further problem in service, where no replacement part could be fitted to a vehicle without extra labour.

As automotive engineering matured, production was broken down into tasks that less specialised staff could do, output rates caught up with demand, and engineering requirements with documented tolerances made parts usable on the production line and in service. Behind this sat a set of disciplines: advance planning, documented specifications and drawings, geometric tolerancing, and the strict production and engineering discipline applied to part variability and measurement systems. In automotive OEM and supplier relationships, one question stayed on the agenda for many years: how to build a quality management framework that every automotive manufacturer would accept. Without an international management framework specific to automotive, each country began to build its own.

Germany's VDA 6.1 quality management framework became active in 1991, and later General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford together developed the QS 9000 framework. Italy contributed AVSQ and France contributed EAQF. For a long time, supplier plants were left without a clear answer on what kind of quality framework or certification they should hold. Suppliers that adapted themselves to meet the OEM and export-market requirements first qualified for ISO 9001 as a base, then went on to QS 9000 and VDA 6.1 certification. The proliferation of certificates and audits pushed major costs on to suppliers and kept them under near-constant external inspection. Supplier organisations raised the point on every platform, asking for a single certification and for fewer audits. The absence of a harmonised, base-level standard between the US and Europe made the issue sharper. Germany's VDA in particular resisted the American QS 9000 framework and tried to establish its own. Working groups were set up on the supplier side, and the work of building a specific, broadly acceptable technical standard for the automotive sector began. While VDA 6.1 and QS 9000 remained reluctant to accept each other, both eventually accepted ISO/TS 16949.

What OEMs expect from suppliers includes full compliance with specification, JIT (just-in-time delivery), very short cycle times, cost targets that continue to tighten, and similar core requirements. That has been delivered through an integrated management framework built on lean operating systems, production requirements, minimised cost and risk, minimised variability and scrap at every stage of the supply chain, and the continuous use of modern methods across the improvement cycle. The result is a set of quality frameworks that cover design, production, and post-production processes under a single structure. In the automotive sector, suppliers of parts and services fitted to the vehicle are required to demonstrate, through quality system certification, that they have the systems to meet every organisational and quality requirement and every individual customer requirement. As sector standards, ISO/TS 16949:2002 and QS 9000:98 led the field. QS 9000 fell out of use completely at the end of 2006, so in practice only ISO/TS 16949 remains relevant today. Note that ISO/TS 16949 has since been replaced by IATF 16949, which is the current active standard for automotive quality management.

The timeline of the automotive quality management framework from the early years to the present runs as follows:

• 1963: MIL-Q 9858A (US military)
• 1965: General Motors General Quality Assurance Standard
• 1969: DEF Standards
• 1974: AQAP Defence Standards
• 1979: BS 5750
• 1981: Ford Q101
• 1983: Chrysler Quality Assurance
• 1987: ISO 9000 series
• 1994: July, ISO 9000 revision
• 1994: August, QS 9000
• 1995: QS 9000, second edition
• 1998: QS 9000, third edition
• 2000: Publication of the ISO 9000:2000 series
• 2002: Publication of TS 16949:2002