ISO 9001: 2000 for Small Businesses

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

We were in the process of changing our current quality system to the Y2000 version of ISO 9001 and had employed a firm of consultants to help us set things up. Unfortunately the consultancy costs kept on escalating and instead of producing an updated version of our existing system, they seemed bent on making us conform to their "off the shelf" system. Although it had already cost us a lot of money in consultancy fees we decided to try to get rid of the consultants and try to develop the documentation ourselves.Although there are a lot of books on the ISO 9001 standard, most of these don't fully describe the standard and appear to only be a sounding board for the author's views on his/her own experiences of management. Little more than a repeat of their previous work. It was, therefore, very refreshing to come across the no nonsense approach to this new standard as shown in Ray Tricker's book, "ISO 9001:2000 for Small Businesses". Having described how the new process approach of ISO 9001:2000 is intended to work and explained the content and inter-relationship of process documentation, the majority of the book consists of an example of a complete Quality Management System (consisting of a Quality Manual, Quality Procedures and Work Instructions) that covers all the recommendations and requirements of ISO 9001:2000 and which can be easily customised to suit any business whether a small corner shop or a large conglomerate. Best of all, however, is the author's very generous offer to supply a free softcopy of this his generic QMS to anyone who has purchased the book. Having taken up this offer, we were even more delighted to learn that the author was also willing to assist us in cost-effectively setting up our system by being available (on-line) to answer questions regarding his generic QMS, how to adapt it in practice and helping us with some of the general questions about quality. We were thus able to complete all of the work internally and (very importantly) at our own pace. We have now fully updated our processes and sailed through our first ISO audit without a problem. For companies wishing to save money, I have no hesitation in recommending this book, it is an absolute lifesaver!

I have just completed a first read through of "ISO9001:2000 for Small Businesses" and I must say I'm quite impressed. A couple of customers have been pushing us to have a formal Quality System in place and I have recently been doing a lot of research on the subject and I must say that this book has been of enormous help. I was particularly impressed with the example QMS contained in Part 6 and was overjoyed to learn that a softcopy of it was available from the author. This will save me hours of typing and ensure that I have not missed anything! In this world of rising prices it is nice to find something that is not only worth its weight in gold, but realistically priced. Well done.

This book takes pride of place amongst my ISO reference books. The book is extensive in its coverage and manages to be informative in plain english, a rare occurance in this field. The Author has not only produced a first class reference book but provided a service by making himself personally available to his readers.The example Quality Manual section of the book proved invaluable when I came to carry out a sanity check on our QMS, highlighting areas for improvement.Since purchasing this book I haven't picked up another, congratulations Mr Tricker, a job well done.