The ISO 9000 is a family of standards that refers to quality management systems and its role is to help organizations meet the needs of their customers and stakeholders. At the same time, organizations have to meet statutory and regulatory requirements related to the product.
These standards are published by ISO, which is the International Organization for Standardization and is available through National standards bodies. ISO 9001 is one of the most widely used management tools in the world today. Nonetheless, it has been criticized as being wasteful and not useful for many organizations.
ISO 9001 benefits are:
- return on assets
- superior performance
- operational performance for the US motor carrier industry
- financial performance
- superior stock market performance
- cycle time reduction
- inventory reductions
Some specialists say that these improvements result from the tendency of many companies to seek ISO 9001 certification. ISO 9001:2008 Quality management systems — Requirements is a document of 30 pages that is available from the national standards organization of each country. There are two other supplements such as: ISO 9000:2005 Quality management systems — Fundamentals and vocabulary and ISO 9004:2009 Managing for the sustained success of an organization — A quality management approach.
Nevertheless, ISO itself doesn’t certify organizations. There are many other bodies that audit organizations and issue ISO 9001 compliance certificates. When an organization applies for ISO 9001 certification, there have to be audited extensive samples of functions, products, services, processes and sites.
ISO 9001 standard has evolved very much as it was revised by standing technical committees and advisory groups. The revision is also based on the feedback from those professionals who are implementing the standard.
There are two types of auditing that are required to become registered to this standard: audits by internal staff trained for this process (internal audits) and external certification body (external audit).
Despite criticism, ISO has the following advantages:
- increased profit
- enhanced marketing
- reduced audits
- creates a more efficient and effective operational common tool for standardization
- promotes international trade
- increased customer satisfaction and retention
- improved employee awareness, motivation and morale
Thus, there are many different opinions related to ISO 9001, so it depends on each company what decides.