The ISO 9000 Series Of Certification
Call Center Solutions
July 1998
The International Organization for Standardization, founded in 1946/47, is an organization dedicated to the creation and promulgation of international standards “with a view to facilitating the international exchange of goods and services, and developing cooperation in the spheres intellectual, scientific, technological and economic activity." ISO is not an acronym, it derives from the Greek word “isos,” meaning equal - a good abstraction for organization publishing international standards. The organization has been responsible for the creation of thousands of standards: the way dashboard gauges look similar in every car made, paper sizes, film speed codes, codes for country names, currencies and languages, to name a few. The ISO 9000 family of standards represents an international consensus on good management practice. Its primary aim is to give organization guidelines on what constitutes an effective quality management system which, in turn, can serve as a framework for continuous improvement. Certification does not ensure that a company's products/services are any good; it simply means that the given company has good business practices in place. Here is a breakdown of the ISO 9000 components:
- ISO 9000: guidelines for the selection and use of the appropriate systems standards.
- ISO 9001: the requirements for an organization whose business processes range from design and development to production, installation and servicing.
- ISO 9002: While it does not include the design control requirements of ISO 9001, its requirements are identical to ISO 9001.
- ISO 9003: the requirements for an organization that uses inspection and testing to ensure that final products and services meet specified requirements.
- ISO 9004: guidelines for internal use by a producer developing its own quality management system to meet business needs.
For more information regarding the ISO 9000 series, contact the Registrar Accreditation Board (RAB), which was established in 1989 to provide accreditation services for ISO 9000 Quality Management Systems (QMS) registrars. There are about 80 registrars in the United States who are responsible for auditing and “surveilling," on a continual basis, those companies that have requested and/or achieved ISO certification. The RAB can be contacted at 888-722-2440 or on the Web at www.asqc.org/rab/ Information can also be obtained through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), at http://web.ansi.org/ or 212-642-4900.