Quality and business
A brief history of BS EN ISO 9000:2000
From the 1920s to the 1940s the method of ensuring delivery of quality products to customers was based on what was known as quality control. At the end of a factory production line there was usually a team of people carrying out inspection activities to weed out products that would not meet customer requirements.
At the end of the 1940's the Department of Defense in the USA recognised the benefits of a system that had transformed the Japanese manufacturing industry. The standardized system developed by the Department of Defense was called quality assurance and involved organizations establishing procedures to manage all the functions that affected the quality of the manufactured products.
The British Standards Institution (BSI) published the first edition of its BS 5750 series of quality assurance Standards in 1979. These were intended for general use by any manufacturer. They enabled organizations to become certified; allowing them to display a mark of registration issued by the body that carried out the assessment.
In 1987 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) based their ISO 9000 family of Standards on BS 5750. The ISO 9000 Standards were adopted by the European Community (now the European Union.) They were also adopted in the UK and the series of Standards is called BS EN ISO 9000.
The Standards were identified as being suitable for organizations delivering services as well as for those manufacturing products, however some adaptations were needed. In 1994 they were revised to make them more user friendly for service industries, and by the year 2000 a major revision was completed creating the current Standard series.
'ISO' is not at acronym, as this would need to change to meet the needs of each language (in English it would be IOS). It is the chosen short name for the International Organization for Standardization and is the Greek word meaning 'equal'.