ISO 9001:2015 STANDARD AND BENEFITS

ISO 9001:2015 is an international Quality Management Standard developed and maintained by the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO). This standard provides requirements for an organisation to implement a Quality Management System.

A Quality Management System is a set of policies, processes and procedures focused on meeting the requirements and expectations of customers and related interested parties and improving their satisfaction. The requirements specified in the Standard were designed to holistically improve and supplement an organisation’s ability to meet their customers’ requirements concerning their products and services.

To summarise, by implementing a Quality Management System an organisation is able to improve their operations ability to meet customer and related party requirements by aligning their practices to tried and tested international best practice and strategy. This will ensure that the quality of an organisation’s products and services will improve over time and make it possible to deliver on the promises made to customers with every transaction.

This international Standard is based on the quality management principles described in ISO 9000 and serves as a framework of key quality management principles necessary and embedded in the standard to provide quality products and services.

The seven quality management principles are:

1 – Customer focus

2 – Leadership

3 – Engagement of people

4 – Process approach

5 – Improvement

6 – Evidence-based decision making

7 – Relationship management

The principles are not ordered by priority. The relative importance of each principle varies from organisation to organisation and may change over time.