With these standards undergoing significant change, you can be forgiven for panicking about when you will need to upgrade your quality and environmental management systems to meet the requirements of the newer versions of ISO 9001 & ISO14001. However, there is no requirement to carry this out immediately, as all organisations will have the full 3 year transition period.
Organisations not currently certified to either ISO 9001 : 2008 or ISO 14001 : 2004, will not be able to achieve certification to these versions of the standards after September 2016. So if your organisation is currently working towards achieving certification to these standards, you have until August 2016 to achieve this, then you will be required to transition to the latest version by September 2018.
Every organisation currently certified, initially achieved certification at different times throughout the year. Therefore, not every organisation will be able to transition to the new standards within their natural 3 year recertification cycle and thus will incur costs for transitioning their certification to the newer standards. We can advise your organisation on the most cost effective way of transitioning to the new standards, so please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.
Our advice to our clients is, “Do not underestimate the impact of the changes, act early and avoid complication”. With this in mind, we are currently working with our existing customer base to develop individually tailored transition plans to ensure that the transition process has minimal impact on their operations and is as cost effective as possible. If you would like to have a chat with us about developing a transition plan for your organisation, please get in touch. Initial consultation is free of charge.