ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies. The object of ISO is to promote the development of standardization and related activities in the world with a view to facilitating international exchange of goods and services, and to developing cooperation in the spheres of intellectual, scientific, technological and economic activity. The results of ISO technical work are published as International Standard?

The ISO 9000 family of standards represents an international consensus on good management practices with the aim of ensuring that the organization can time and time again deliver the product or services that meet the client’s quality requirements. These good practices have been distilled into a set of standardized requirements for a quality management system, regardless of what your organization does, its size, or whether it is in the private, or public sector. The family of ISO 9000 standards have been developed by ISO and it is made up of four core standards: a) ISO 9000:2005 – Fundamentals and Vocabulary b) ISO 9001:2008 – Quality Management Systems – Requirements c) ISO 9004:2009– Quality Management Systems – Guidelines for performance improvements d) ISO 19011: 2011 – Guidelines for quality and/or environmental management systems auditing

“The Certification body” is a legal entity who is Authorized by Accrediation body to provide ISO Certification on behlaf of Accreditation Body. The term `certification body’ is used in some countries, like, India, Elsewhere, they prefer to say that they `register’ organizations complying with ISO 9000.

In simple terms, accreditation is like certification of the certification body. `Accreditation’ should not be used as an interchangeable alternative for certification or registration.

The IS/ISO 9000 standards are applicable to all types of organizations. The definition of the term `product’ in IS/ISO 9000:2005 also include services and their combination. Therefore, the requirements of IS/ISO 9001:2015 are equally applicable to service sector as it is applicable to product manufacturing company.

As a minimum you should familiarize yourself not only with the requirements of ISO 9001:2015. You have to clearly understand your organization’s activities and processes and appropriately interpret the requirements of the standards. Implement the requirements in the various activities and processes adding value to these processes and activities. For training programmes on general awareness on the requirements, content and philosophies of the IS/ISO 9000 standards

• Provides an opportunity to increase value to the activities of the organization • Improve the performance of processes/activities continually • Satisfaction of customers • Attention to resource management • Implementation of statutory and regulatory requirements related to product/services • Better management control

CERTIFICATION APPLICABLE TO ALL BUSINESS UNITS (SMALL/ BIG): ISO 9001 – (Quality Management System) ISO 14001 – (Environment Management System) ISO 18001- (Occupational Health and Safety Management) CERTIFICATION APPLICABLE TO SPECIFIC BUSINESS UNITS (SMALL/ BIG): ISO 22000 – (Food Safety Management System) ISO 27001 – (Information Security Management Systems) ISO 50001 – (Energy management) ISO 10002 – (Customer Satisfaction & Complaint Handling) ISO/TS 16949 – (Automotive Industry Quality Management) ISO 13485 – (Certification for Medical Device Manufacturing)

All are on-site audits done by the certification body, will have corrective actions issued that need to be addressed, and will have an audit report issued to your company as a record of the audit. The difference is the number of hours devoted to processes in the audit. For the certification/re-certification audit, the certification body auditors will look at the implementation of every process within your QMS to check for conformance to the ISO 9001 standard, as well as your company documentation, process effectiveness, and continual improvement. This audit will often take several auditors many days to complete, depending on the size of your company and the number of processes within your QMS. By comparison, the surveillance audit will spend less time on only some portions of your QMS processes, rather than everything.