I am not in business, so please tell me what ISO 9000 and 9001 certification is, and if applicable, your views on these things.
Look here for a complete answer, but in short they are standard guidelines followed by companies to insure quality in their manufacturing process.
The International Organization for Standardization is a group of national standards organizations that set up a series of quality procedures. The purpose was to provide a universal set of standards. For example, one of the American organizations that sets manufacturing standards for products is ANSI. If you have a bicycle helmet, it should say on it somewhere ANSI certified, showing that the company made that helmet following procedures that met ANSI’s standards. IF you were a helmet manufacturer selling all over the world, though, getting approval from every countries’ national standards organization would be a very expensive pain in the ass.
To be ISO 9000 certified, you have to have a fully documented and carefully followed procedure that meets the ISO 9000 standards for your product, and an outside auditor has to agree that you meet those standards.
I don’t know what ISO 9001 is, I’d guess and updated version.
Just in case you don’t get many replies, I asked this question over a year ago and got some good responses:
To expand a little on what has been hinted at: ISO900x is a set of standards on how well you document your processes. It does NOT have anything to do with the quality of the final product(s). All it means is that a ISO900x certified company can produce documents that explain how their work is performed.
A cynical observation is that when the Firestone stuff was plastered all over TV, they showed the Decatur plant where most of the bad tires where made. Outside it there was a large sign proudly stating the plant was ISO9001 certified.
But again, the certification only means the processes to do a good job are there, not that the end product is any good.
Personally, I think it’s a big waste of time and doesn’t add anything to the company, but then I’m an engineer, and not in process development.
Markus
zwede- ISO9001 actually includes provisions for statistical process control which IF practiced properly can actually lead to significant product improvement. I will concede however that this is a huge “IF” as most companies that are certified fail miserably in this area.
One criticism often directed at ISO9000 is that it seems to be designed with production enterprises in mind, and that you have to “bend” it if you’re selling service or development. (Auditor: “So, how often do you get your measuring tools calibrated ?” Quality Manager:“We develop accounting SW! We have very few measuring tools.”) What I saw last I was involved in a project of this sort seemed to reinforce that impression, but that was a few years back.
IMHO, the weakness is that as long as you define your standard with sufficient care, you might get a small subset of your operations certified with relative ease, then bang the ISO 9000 drum for all that it’s worth. This has been done a little too often and I believe ISO 9000 has lost some of its credibility for that reason. Of course, I can only speak for the IT business with any credibility.
S. Norman