An expert advisory system for ISO 9001 based QMS of manufacturing environment

The ISO 9001 quality management system has been widely accepted and adapted as a national standard by most industrial countries. Despite its high popularity and the urgent demand from customers to implement ISO 9001, some major concerns for those organizations that are seeking registration to ISO 9001 include the expensive cost and the lengthy time to implement. The purpose of this paper is to describe an expert advisory system for ISO 9001 implementation by using an expert system. This expert advisory system integrated the ISO 9001 quality system guidelines and domain experience a into a knowledge-based expert system. By identifying the critical ISO elements and comparing the company's current quality performance with ISO standards, this advisory system provides assessment results and implementation suggestions in terms of corrective and preventive action reports to the organization. The advisory system has been validated by its implementation at Pune based small scale company. The following contains a description of the system and a discussion of the validation results. Limitations of the system and recommendations for future research are also discussed.