ISO 9001:2015

A quality management standard describes which requirements a company’s management system must fulfill to correspond to a certain standard in the implementation of quality management. It can be both informative for the implementation within a company and also be used as evidence of certain standards with regard to third parties. The evidence is provided with a certification process with subsequent issuing of a certificate for a limited period by independent certification bodies.

EN ISO 9000 ff QMS
Standard series EN ISO 9000 ff. has created standards that document the principles for quality management actions. Together, they form a cohesive set of standards for quality management systems, which should facilitate mutual understanding on a national and international level.

Each product (including each service) is subject to different specific requirements and is thus only to be created under individual quality assurance measures. Quality management systems, however, are not product-oriented and so are set up individually independently of the industry and the specific products and/or services and contracts with customers.

The successful management and operation of an organization requires it to be managed and controlled in a clear, systematic way. One path to success can be to introduce and maintain a management system, which is oriented towards a continuous improvement in performance by taking into account the requirements of all interested parties. Managing and controlling an organization comprises quality management alongside other management disciplines.

The standards EN ISO 9000:2000 ff. fundamentally have a process-oriented structure. The predecessor standards ISO 9000:1994 ff. defined 20 elements of quality management, which corresponded to the standard processes in the manufacturing industry from development, production and assembly, to customer service, so that the structure of the predecessor standard made a transfer, for instance, to service companies difficult as there were no analogous process designations.

Glossary Technical terms at a glance