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ISO 9000
ISO 9000 has become an international reference for quality management requirements in business-to-business dealings. ISO standards are overseen by the International Organization for Standardization. ISO 9000 is concerned with "quality management". It provides guidelines for what an organization should do to enhance customer satisfaction by meeting customer and applicable regulatory requirements and continually to improve its performance in this regard.
The ISO 9000 family is primarily concerned with "quality management". This means what an organization does to fulfill:
- the customer's quality requirements
- applicable regulatory requirements, while aiming to
- enhance customer satisfaction, and
- achieve continual improvement of its performance in pursuit of these objectives.
Why the initials ISO?
ISO standards are overseen by the "International Organization for Standardization." However, this organization would have different abbreviations in different languages ("IOS" in English, "OIN" in French for Organisation internationale de normalisation). Therefore, it was decided at the outset to use a word derived from the Greek isos, meaning "equal". Therefore, whatever the country, whatever the language, the short form of the organization's name is always ISO.