ISO 9001 – A Summary

• Date: January 27, 2011
• Source: Admin

One of the standards of the ISO 9000 family, ISO 9001 is an internationally recognised standard of quality management in businesses, applying to the processes that create and control the products and services produced by an organisation. A systematic control of activities is undertaken to ensure that the customers’ expectations and requirements are fully met.  All requirements of ISO 9001 are generic and are designed so that they can apply to almost any product or service in any part of the world, regardless of type, size and nature.

Background

ISO was published first in 1987, largely based on the earlier BS 5750, developed by the BSI Group. Since 1978, the BSI Group has been the certifying organization for quality management.

The standards of ISO 9001 are published by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization and available through national standards bodies. The fundamentals of quality management systems include eight management principles and ISO 9001 deals with the requirements that organizations have to meet if the wish to obtain the ISO 9001 certification. A certification to the effect that an organization meets the requirements of ISO 9001 can be obtained from a third party competent to provide this certificate. Currently, over a million organizations all over the world have ISO 9001 certification making it the single most effective management tool.

Why ISO 9001?

The worldwide adoption of ISO 9001 is attributable to a number of factors, the principal among them being major purchasers requiring their suppliers to hold ISO 9001 certification, significant financial benefits identified for organizations certified with ISO 9001, organizations achieving palpably better return on assets compared with those without this certification, superior operational performance of an organisation after receiving the certification, superior performance in the stock market and investments in an ISO 9001 organization reaping huge rewards in comparison with its peers without such certification.

The mechanism of improved results has been subject to much research and has been largely attributed to a psychological boost of employees from the sheer aura of this certification.

Consequences of Violation

Even after an Organization has been granted the ISO 9001 certification, regular audits are conducted to check whether they still conform to the standards. If these checks reveal that the organization at any point falls short, non-compliance is issued and the certification is withdrawn.

Sources:

http://www.isoqar.com/iso9001/qualintro.htm

http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail?csnumber=46486

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9000