The International Organization for Standardization publishes reference standards for production processes, safety requirements, quality assurance, and much more, informing thousands of companies across all sectors and worldwide on how to work better.
When it comes to compliance in the field of quality, ISO 9001 certification is a true benchmark in the industry, and an organization that is certified to this standard can assure all interested parties that it maintains a certain standard in carrying out its daily activities.
In particular, customers can be certain that the organization is able to consistently provide products and services of the agreed-upon level.
ISO 9000 is a family of standards created by ISO and, in particular, by the ISO/TC 176 Technical Committee. It includes standards, norms, and guidelines that have been designed to help companies create an efficient quality system that can benefit them, their employees, customers, and all other stakeholders.
Although most people know what ISO 9001 is and how it works, we have noticed that there is often quite a bit of confusion when generically referring to "ISO 9000."
In fact, "ISO 9000" generally refers to a family of standards that contains many individual standards grouped under this name; among these, we also find ISO 9001.
The generic name given to this family of standards comes from one of the documents contained within it, which is, precisely, ISO 9001:2015, entitled "Quality management systems – Fundamentals and vocabulary," which, precisely, defines the terminology we find in the rest of the "ISO 9000" family of documents.
ISO 9000:2015 describes the fundamentals of quality management and also includes the principles of quality management on which the entire family of standards is based.
These principles are:
- Customer focus: companies must understand the needs of their customers, meet their requirements, and exceed their expectations;
- Leadership: it is necessary to establish a purpose and direction in the company to help employees achieve their goals (learn more);
- Engagement of people; every employee of the company should be actively involved in the work related to quality so that the organization can derive real benefits from the application of the system; -
- Process approach: when individual activities are viewed as a process, the desired result is achieved more effectively and efficiently (learn more);
- Continuous improvement: this should be a permanent objective of your company (learn more);
- Evidence-based decision making: companies should make decisions only after analyzing data and information;
- Relationship management: if all parties involved benefit, greater value can be created
Considering how close the numbers "9000" and "9001" are, one might imagine that there are few distinctions between the two documents ISO 9000 and ISO 9001, but this is absolutely not true.
ISO 9000 is a document to read and familiarize yourself with to understand all the other specific standards related to quality, while ISO 9001 is a real standard according to which organizations put in place actions in order to certify their quality management system.
ISO 9001:2015, therefore, is a standard that is part of the "ISO 9000" family and that allows you to build a good quality management system; it allows the organization that decides to adopt it to reduce errors in business activities.
The standard consists of a true explanation of the requirements to be met to implement a Quality Management System within an organization. In particular, it describes the fundamental concepts and principles of quality management that are universally applicable to organizations seeking success through the management system, supply chain logistics, improved internal communications, an active role of top management, and much more.
All the requirements of ISO 9001:2015 are generic and are intended to apply to any organization, regardless of its type, size, products, and services it provides because any entity can benefit from following these standards and principles.
To implement the management system, both a gap analysis is necessary, which identifies the differences between the company's way of working and the requirements in the standard, and a series of internal audits to verify the application of the requirements. Any company that wants to implement ISO 9001 is in fact required to conduct internal audits to assess the effectiveness of the quality management system and assess whether it is ready for certification.
All this because ISO 9001 was designed to help entrepreneurs act for better quality assurance through the application of regulatory requirements.
Lastly, for further improvement opportunities that go beyond the application of ISO 9001, it is possible to use ISO 9004. However, the only standard according to which one can be certified is ISO 9001.
In conclusion, ISO 9000:2015 contains the terminology of quality-related standards and also gives its name to the entire documentary family that deals with the topic of quality, the "ISO 9000" family. ISO 9001, on the other hand, is a standard according to which a company can be certified to ensure that its activity is focused on the customer and on continuous improvement.