Email a collegue.| Headline: | ISO 9000 (ISO 9001:2000) Certification |
| Description: | This page provides a background to ISO 9000 (specifically ISO 9001:2000 certification), and the benefits for your business.
What is ISO 9001:2000 ISO 9001:2000 is the internationally recognised standard for an organisation’s Quality Management. The term “quality” refers to all those features of a product or service which are required by the customer. An organisation’s "Quality Management" refers to an organisation’s actions to ensure that its products or services satisfy its customers’ quality requirements and complies with any regulations applicable to those products or services. Background Formalised quality assurance originally came from the Defence Industry’s need for standards. For example, to supply the Ministry of Defence (MoD), a company had to write up its procedure for making its product, have the procedure inspected by the MoD and then ensure that its workers followed the published procedures. The idea of quality assurance spread beyond the military and in 1966, the UK Government led the first national campaign for quality and reliability with the slogan "Quality is everybody's business." However, by this time, suppliers were being assessed by any number of their customers and it was widely recognised that such duplication of effort was a chronic waste of time and money. Progress was finally made in 1969, when a UK Government committee report on the subject recommended that suppliers' methods should be assessed against a generic standard of quality assurance. In 1971, the British Standards Institute (BSI) published the first UK standard for quality assurance (BS 9000), which was developed for the electronics industry. Then, in 1974, the BSI published BS 5179; Guidelines for Quality Assurance. This led to a shift in the burden of inspection from the customer to the supplier, as quality assurance could be guaranteed by the supplier to the customer through third-party inspection. Through the 1970’s, the BSI organised meetings with industry to set a common standard, which culminated in the BS5750 standard in 1979. Key industry bodies agreed to drop their own standards and use BS5750 instead. The purpose of BS5750 was to provide a common contractual document, demonstrating that industrial production was controlled. |
| Date: | 26.02.2006 |
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