ISO 22163 Certification of international railway industries standard

Courtesy: ISO 22163 Certification of international railway industries standard

ISO/TS 22163:2017 specifies requirements for a quality management system when an organization:

a) needs to demonstrate its ability to consistently provide products and services that meet customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements, and

b) aims to enhance customer satisfaction through the effective application of the system, including processes for improvement of the system and the assurance of conformity to customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.

All the requirements of this International Standard are generic and are intended to be applicable to any organization, regardless of its type or size, or the products and services it provides.

IRIS (International Railway Industry Standard) is a rail related business management system that has existed since 2006 and is applied worldwide. It focuses on the overall value added chain (design and development, sales, purchasing, production and service), incl. the underlying project management.

In May 2017, this Standard, which had specially been developed for the rail industry by UNIFE (Association of European Railway Industries) and supplements the ISO 9001 requirements by adding rail specific requirements, became ISO/TS 22163. Together with the IRIS^® Certification Conformity assessment, this ISO/TS 22163 forms the basis for certification acc. to IRIS Rev. 3. The explicit goal of this Standard is the following: A well-founded management system that also helps to achieve adequate product and service quality, which meets the requirements of the products of the rail industry that have a service life of up to 40 years.

Basically ISO/TS 22163 includes ISO 9001, which has been supplemented and extended by adding many aspects, such as project management, initial sampling (FAI – First Article Inspection), RAMS (Reliability, Accessibility, Maintainability and Safety) or life cycle costs. Among other things, a special focus is put on incorporating the entire supply chain.