Posted: 1/9/2010 6:14:33 PM EDT
| Given how few arms manufacturers have ISO certification, would it be reasonable to expect a handgun from an ISO 9001 company to be solid and serviceable, if not particularly flashy? Or do certified quality management systems have nothing to do with actual quality? |
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It means a predefined system of standard work procedure and quality checks at all levels of the manufacturing process are followed to ensure a superior product.
Many will say ISO 9001 is a managerial froo-froo but I have worked in certified companies and the plan has some positive merit. When the ISO 9001 plan is followed after certification, and not just during the inspection periods, quality does improve and remains to high standards at all levels. |
| ISO certification proves that a company has a "management system" in place for the given ISO certification area. It generally does result in a better product, but is in itself no guarantee of a quality item. I'm not at all surprised that their are few gun manufacturers who are ISO certified, given the wide variances in quality I've seen from a number of top tier manufacturuers. It's indicitive of the fact that they don't have process controls in place to prevent bad product from getting out the door. |
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ISO certification can be bought.... Quite true, just like Motor Trend's "Car OF The Year" award. In the case of ISO you just create a good paper trail and send 'em your cash. Why bother? As the ISO standards are voluntarily self-imposed, the easiest way to deal with ISO certification is to just not get involved. Not being ISO certified doesn't seem to hurt a company. |
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I was in charge of implementing the AS9003 Certification for my company and wrote the entire quality manual. AS9003 is a subset of ISO9000 specifically designed for small manufactures.
Did it improve our quality? Humm... maybe. We are a custom shop designing high tech electronic gismos for mil and aerospace. Pretty much everything is a one-time production run. The shipping items are really prototype # 3 or 4. The one thing it forced us to do was create better documentation so if we ever needed to make the item again, the 'tribal knowledge' in some of the assembly procedures are not lost. Would it help a gun manufacture? I don't know. Do you really need a procedure for polishing a barrel? Maybe… The paperwork can place an unnecessary burden on production and I have seen it actually degrade quality from some of my long time suppliers. |
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Taurus is ISO 9001 certified as well. Wow, really? Well, it does say so on their website.................................................. 
I'm surprised.........................and I say this as the owner of ONE very good, very solid Taurus revolver. Well I just purchased a 709 Slim, much to my surprise. Only have 133 rounds down the pipe, but it performed flawlessly. It sure seems well made. At the price I paid I'm not too worried about it. Time will tell of course, but I keep hearing from folks who have had good luck with their Taurus products, so maybe they have turned a corner. And honestly, you can go to any manufacturer specific forum on the web and hear tales of woe, because happy owners rarely make posts on the interwebs. |
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I disagree. I hear ALOT more bad reports about Taurus than many of the other "major" manufacturers.
It does seem to be a fact that their quality control is shit. And it's known that their customer service, many times, it shit. You and I are lucky.................we have Taurus guns that are good to go. That's the way I look at it. ETA: Got close to 2,000 rnds of various types through my revolver. I hope your auto stays "true" and gives you no issues. |
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would it be reasonable to expect a handgun from an ISO 9001 company to be solid and serviceable No. ISO has absolutely nothing to do with quality. It's all about consistency and accountability. I have personally been involved in ISO implementation and hate it. ISO is about consistency. It's designed to make certain that the 10,000th item is identical to the 3rd item. In other words if the first one is good, they are all good, if the first one is problematic, they are all problematic. |
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It means no more than "CNC" automatically means Quality…
And Taurus is ISO 9001 certified, it is on Taurus's web site Link, near the bottom. Since 1994! |
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would it be reasonable to expect a handgun from an ISO 9001 company to be solid and serviceable No. ISO has absolutely nothing to do with quality. It's all about consistency and accountability. I have personally been involved in ISO implementation and hate it. ISO is about consistency. It's designed to make certain that the 10,000th item is identical to the 3rd item. In other words if the first one is good, they are all good, if the first one is problematic, they are all problematic. I suppose it's possible to have consistency and accountbility without it resulting in quality, but is it possible to obtain quality without consistency and responsibility? I use responsibility in the last as that is what accountability is hoped to instill. Whether this happens or not depends on the attitudes of management and the employees. So I guess ISO 9001 implements not necessarily quality, but rather the fundamentals upon which quality is based. It would then depend upon management and workers to use that base to produce a quality product. Is that an accurate assessment? |
| The government, including state and local, typically requires ISO 9001 compliance to do business so I expect most firearms manufacturers are compliant. Also, ISO compliance does not predict reliability or even quality. It just says that you can demonstrate you have repeatable processes. I've worked with some really crappy manufacturers that were ISO compliant. |
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I suppose it's possible to have consistency and accountbility without it resulting in quality, but is it possible to obtain quality without consistency and responsibility? I use responsibility in the last as that is what accountability is hoped to instill. Whether this happens or not depends on the attitudes of management and the employees. So I guess ISO 9001 implements not necessarily quality, but rather the fundamentals upon which quality is based. It would then depend upon management and workers to use that base to produce a quality product. Is that an accurate assessment? The big problem with ISO is that since it's about consistency, rather than quality, product improvement is negatively affected. Thus if you want to fix something, by the time you do the documentation/paperwork to change a drawing and get it into the system you have made another dozen or thousand widgets. For very large manufacturers like the car companies that have "model years" this is actually a good thing. You save up all of the fixes and changes implement them all at once, for a smaller company that makes capitol equipment ISO ends up costing you a lot of money in terms of rework. |
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Unless you implement the ECO as a running change.
We do custom wafer-handling machines ($100K- $800K each) for the semiconductor industry and for the most part that is the way we handle it. At most only the one or two units on the floor at any given time will need to be reworked, and compared to the total cost of the system, the changes are fairly minor as a %. |
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You can make lead life vests under ISO. They will all fail the exact same way. Too bad they don't make cluster bombs under ISO standards. They don't all explode exactly the same way and that is a fail in my book. Even under ISO you have met the requirements if your defect rate is not higher than was decided. If the standard the company developed under ISO says defects of no more than 2%, then 1% is compliant. |