ISO 9001 Standards

Some people often think about ISO 9001 as a system. As a group of documents, ISO 9001 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 9001 is both an international standard and until December 2000, was a family of some 20 international standards. As a standard, ISO 9001 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 9001 is a standard. Before ISO 9001 came along, organizations had found ways of doing – optimizing Performance across the whole organization. Not focusing on particular parts at the Expense of the others, and often diverting resources away from other parts of the system.