Ioan and Ahne, Thanks for the viewpoints. For Ioan, you talked of continuous improvement requirements. Totally agree and so does ISO as first stated in section 5 though the authors call it continual improvement. I'm glad to hear you practice CE. For Ahne, I appreciate your stance concerning what I call rigidity and how it obviously does nothing for the creative process. I agree with your other assessment concerning creativity and I too feel it has its place especially in an R&D environment. Once created, product development needs to be a bit more formal - as indicated in 7.3. For all, standards are what you make of them. Again, ISO doesn't tell anyone how to do anything. It requires that certain things be done but it is up to the user to make them work, or not, and how well. Use them wisely and benifit. Don't use them and forget ISO registration of hope of achieving CPI or DFM/CE. I really don't consider this an opinion but a simple reporting of some success stories I have seen and helped create. Thanks, Earl --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8d To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet To temporarily halt delivery of Technet send the following message: SET Technet NOMAIL Search previous postings at: www.ipc.org > On-Line Resources & Databases > E-mail Archives Please visit IPC web site (http://www.ipc.org/html/forum.htm) for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5315 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------