ISO 9000 is a set of interrelated ideas, principles and rules and could therefore be considered a system in the same way that we refer to the metric system or the imperial system of measurement. ISO 9000 is both an international standard and until year 2008, was a family of some 20 international standards. As a standard, ISO 9000 was divided into 4 parts with part 1 providing guidelines on the selection and use of the other standards in the family. The family of standards included requirements for quality assurance and guidelines on quality management. Some might argue that none
of these are in fact standards in the sense of being quantifiable. The critics argue that the standards are too open to interpretation to be standards anything that produces such a wide variation is surely an incapable process with one of its primary causes being a series of objectives that are not measurable. However, if we take a broader view of standards, any set of rules, rituals, requirements, quantities, targets or behaviours that have been agreed by a group of people could be deemed to be a standard. Therefore by this definition, ISO 9000 is a standard.
ISO Auditor Training - The story of ISO 9000 Standards is a story of standards, methods and regulation. The brief history that follows is in no way comprehensive but is intended to illustrate four things: that ISO 9000 standards are an ancient concept that survived several millennia; that a means of verifying compliance often follows the setting of standards.
ReplyDelete