ISO 9000

ISO 9000

ISO 9000

Introduction

In an era of rapid globalization, technological innovation, population boom, and environmental change, the need for international collaboration and standardization exists across disciplines in order to decrease duplication and the reinvention of competing standardizing platforms and processes for business, government, and society. Accordingly, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) was founded in 1947 to address these needs and to facilitate knowledge transfer for the sake of collaborative standardization within a global civil society. Today, the ISO is a network, composed of the national standards institutes of 162 countries, and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It runs under the auspices of the United Nations. It is a nongovernmental organization (NGO) intended to form a bridge between the public and private sectors, and which strives to find solutions that meet the needs of both business and the general public. Each country has one representative, and some are part of their country's government, while others have their roots in business and industry. (www.iso.org)

The mission of the ISO is to partner with a global network of standardizing bodies and stakeholder in order to identify, synthesize, arbitrate, and bring forth consensus on voluntary standards for operational platforms and practices in areas such as business, technology, environmental management, government, and public policy. (www.iso.org)

ISO 9000 is a standard for systems quality management. The standard is published and maintained by the ISO, while it is managed by external accreditation and certification. ISO 9000 is a family of quality-management standards intended to provide a framework for companies and organizations to ensure customer satisfaction and a best-practice level of organizational competence, and is intended to be both applicable and achievable by all organizations, regardless of size, location, or industry. (www.asq.org)

Discussion

History

The history of ISO 9000 started in the military, to avoid disasters such as in the case of explosions that occurred in the United Kingdom, began requiring manufacturers to keep writing all the procedures. From 1959, United States also used a program of quality requirements for military supplies. In 1968, NATO AQAP specified (Allied Quality Assurance Procedures) apply quality requirements to military supplies of the alliance. With time and pressure from buyers of inputs, the idea of standardization was beyond the military sphere. In 1971, the British Standardization Institute published the standard BS 9000, specifically for quality assurance in the electronics industry. This was further developed in 1970 to become the BS 5750, more general and applicable. The first version of ISO 9000 was published in a paper in 1987, ISO 9000:1987, and was derived from BS 5750.

Definition

The ISO 9000 series is a set of rules aimed at ordering the company management who have won international recognition and acceptance due to the higher power that consumers have high international competition and enhanced by the integration processes. Some of these standards specify requirements for quality systems (ISO 9001, 9002, 9003) and others give a guide to aid in the interpretation and implementation of quality system (ISO 9000-2, ISO 9004-1). ...