International Organization For Standardization: ISO 9000

ISO 9000

International Organization For Standardization (ISO) was established in 1947 which involves 157 countries in order to coordinate and unify various industrial standards. Prior to the establishment of the ISO, there are 2 main independent organization that had similar objectives as the ISO, that are National Standardizing Association (ISA) and also United Nation Standards Coordinating Committee (UNSCC). ISA and UNSCC are both established in 1926 and 1944 respectively. Unfortunately, both were not achieved worldwide acceptance. ISO is not product standard but a Quality System Standard. ISO was then formed and adopted majority of the rules and procedures from ISA. ISO has published a lot of international standards in many fields and sectors including in mechanical engineering. One of the examples of ISO that involved in mechanical engineering is ISO 9000 Quality System Series Standards. ISO 9000 is a set of international standard for quality management systems and quality assurance which is critical to international business. It require firms to document their quality control system at every step from the incoming raw materials, product design in-process monitoring and so on, so, that they’ll be able to identify those areas that are causing quality problems and correct them. ISO 9000 is an international standard for quality management systems. The origin of ISO 9000 is started with the 1959 United States Department of Defence MIL-Q-9858 quality management program which then in 1968 this program was adopted by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), then, followed by British Standard Institute (BSI) in 1979. ISO was later on created ISO 9000 standards in 1987. In 1994, new versions of the ISO 9000 standards were issued. It...

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..., Handling, storage, packaging, preservation, and delivery, Control of quality records, Internal quality audits, Training, Servicing and also Statistical techniques. All standards apply to all types of industry sector whether they are large or small industry and also including design, manufacturing, service, research, development and also education. Unfortunately, this wide applicability also became a weakness of the model especially in the software development and maintenance industry. This is because, it is difficult in defining a common language that everyone in the industry sector can truly understand and apply. To compensate those problem ISO had published a new guideline specifically for software development that was ISO 9000-3.

REFERENCE

1. Ron Kurtus, “Comparing ISO 9000 and TQM” revised 11 March 2001

2. Implementing ISO 9000 Quality Management System