ISO 9001 is the worlds leading Standard for Quality Management, with over 26,000 Organisations in the UK alone applying the Standard to their management systems.
The benefits of the ISO 9001 standard include:
The Standard sets out 10 clauses of requirements, which are aligned to other ISO management systems to aid users in the development and management of their systems.
The history of ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management System can trace its origin back to the 1950’s with US and UK government departments establishing standards for military procurement. Large organisations which supplied government procurement agencies often had to comply with a variety of quality assurance requirements for each contract awarded which led the defence industry to adopt mutual recognition of NATO AQAP, MIL-Q and Defence standards. BS5750 was the next step in this emerging process.
BS5750 was the first specific 'quality management system' standard applicable to industry as a whole and was published in 1979. Building on the success of BS5750, the ISO 9001 standard was developed by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) to extend the reach of Quality Management to an international audience. This was agreed and adopted, and first published in 1987. Periodically the standard has been reviewed by the ISO technical committee every 5 to 8 years to ensure it is relevant to the demands of global business demonstrating its own continual improvement cycle.
ISO 9004 has been written as a complementary guidance standard that provides insights to how aspects are applied as a maturity model.
