Registrations to the ISO 9000 standard have grown rapidly in recent years with 343,643 certificates in 150 countries at the start of 2000, a growth of 71,769 on the previous year, of which 23,900 were in Europe. This suggests that there is a wide‐spread belief in the business benefits of ISO...

As competition in the global economy grows, management systems are becoming increasingly complex and diverse. Management system audits, applied for the examination of system effectiveness and compliance with planned arrangements, seem to be following the same path. This paper addresses the...

In recent years, two performance evaluation methodologies have received significant attention in managerial circles: quality audit and self‐assessment. While the quality audit examines the compliance of a quality system with ISO 9000 standards and its suitability to achieve stated objectives,...

This paper illustrates a perennial self‐audit model for quality management system (QMS) improvement. The model is based on the concepts of self‐ and nano‐audits, which directly contradict the two central tenets of classical auditing, namely auditor independence and the discrete nature of...