I am currently employed at a tier 1 supplier of electronic and electro-mechanical modules. Some years ago it was mandated by our customers, Ford, GM and Chrysler that we would have to be certified to QS-9000. No certification, no business. This involved company wide training, a lot of paperwork and regular audits, both internal and external. A couple of years ago, for reasons I'm not entirely sure of, the "big 3" decided that QS-9000 wasn't working. We are now certified to the new standard, ISO/TS 16949. Of course this meant more training, paperwork and audits. I'm sure they think it's useful but I really don't see it. About the only difference I can see is that the manual is not as thick as the one for QS-9000. One thing I know for sure, it certainly provides job security for all those third party auditing companies. That and we get treats when we pass an audit.

The international standardisation of quality systems is something of a myth, the actual policing and auditing from country-to-country is so variable that it is difficult to believe the certificate itself means anything these days. As an auditor for a Tier 1 supplier I certainly can not recommend accepting just the ISO/QS certificate as giving any confidence in the systems a company has, except within your own geographic area where you are familiar with the quality auditing of the approvals body. This isn't just an excuse for me to have "jollies" to foreign companies, we have had to reject some suppliers who seemed fine on paper but the reality was significantly below what we as a customer needed to provide the guarantees we were making to the OEM we supply. My work is mainly in the mechanical field but I hear from some of my QA and auditing colleagues that the electronics field, which you primarily cover, is no different.

Having moved from a company with every possible quality standard to one that has none (both in the automotive electronics fields) I can honestly say that there are some significant benefits to certification. Even if the certification means nothing to some external customers it at least gets the company into a "quality" frame of mind and makes traceability easier and not reliant on the memory of a few good people. The paperchase with too much quality can stifle innovation and I have experienced this, but no system at all is total chaos and is not a pleasant place to work as no-one can accept any blame and nothing seems to get any better (we repeat the same mistakes again and again as there is no improvement process).