Japanese analysis of challenges and way forward

摘要

It was around 1993 that the certification of ISO 9001-based management systems, followed by others, started on a large scale in Japan. Two years earlier, in 1991, the Japan Quality Assurance Organization (JQA - www.jqa.jp), had became a pioneer in this field and started providing its services as a management system certification body. Since then, JQA has been trying very hard to provide fair, impartial and reliable certification services. In the following years, the number of certifications in Japan to the ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 management system standards (MSS) has shown a dramatic increase: from 10421 to 52874 for ISO 9001 and from 2 248 to 21452 for ISO 14001 between the end of June 1999 and the end of March 2006.