The ISO 9000 family of quality management systems (QMS) standards is designed to help organizations ensure that they meet the needs of customers and other stakeholders while meeting statutory and regulatory requirements related to a product or service
The ISO 9000 family is a set of international standards for quality management systems. It was developed in March 1987 by International Organization for Standardization. The goal of it is to help organizations ensure that they meet customer and other stakeholder needs within the statutory and regulatory requirements related to a product or service. The ISO refers to the set of standards as a "family", bringing together the standard for quality management systems and a set of "supporting standards", and their presentation as a family facilitates their integrated application within an organisation. ISO 9000 deals with the fundamentals and vocabulary of QMS, including the seven quality management principles that underlie the family of standards. ISO 9001 deals with the requirements that organizations wishing to meet the standard must fulfill. A companion document, ISO/TS 9002, provides guidelines for the application of ISO 9001. ISO 9004 gives guidance on achieving sustained organizational success.
Third-party certification bodies confirm that organizations meet the requirements of ISO 9001. Over one million organizations worldwide are independently certified, making ISO 9001 one of the most widely used management tools in the world today. However, the ISO certification process has been criticised as being wasteful and not being useful for all organizations.