"This signifies the first time that specific activities undertaken by organisations will start counting towards their transition to the final standards when they are published later in the year," said Steve Williams, LRQA System and Governance Manager.
Steve Williams, along with other LRQA technical experts have confirmed the approach that they believe organisations should take in order to ensure that they are ready to transition to the new standards.
"The common management system framework introduced by Annex SL, means that both ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001:2015 will contain a number of changes throughout, including terms and definitions being standardised. Based on this, and in line with all new and revised ISO Standards, ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 will be structured into 10 standard clauses," explained Williams.
"Purchasing the FDIS versions of the standards will help to ensure that the individuals responsible for managing the transition process have a full understanding of the new and changing requirements in each standard, as well as enabling them to start thinking about the necessary steps they need to take to facilitate a smooth transition.
Organisations should ensure that they understand both the specific areas that contain new explicit requirements (which include organisational context, knowledge and risk-based thinking) as well as the areas of the standard that have been revised or contain more specific information (such as the importance of senior management engagement in both ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001:2015). ISO 9001:2015 is also expected to contain more focus on process and change management, with ISO 14001:2015 being anticipated to have an emphasis on policy and the need for processes," summarised Williams.
For any organisation, the degree of change required depends on a range of factors, with the majority of those being unique to the context of the organisation and their own management systems.