ISO 9001 Management System Standard

The ISO 9001 standard details requirements for quality management systems and the aim of this standard is to help organisations meet internal quality standards as well as the requirements of customers and trading partners. This standard could be considered as the business management standard since it effectively covers how your business is organised and run.

The standard requires a clearly defined organisational structure with roles and responsibilities to be clearly defined with the involvement and commitment from top management. Other requirements of this standard are that documented information is controlled and managed effectively that other key resources such as staff and equipment and effectively managed and that there are clear systems in place for management of other relevant operational processes. Effective systems for ongoing monitoring, checking, dealing with problems and making improvements should also be in place. Since the introduction of the ISO 9001:2015 standard there is less emphasis on having specific documented procedures and there is no longer any requirement to have a Quality Manual with the focus on taking a risk-based approach and therefore have effective management systems in place to identify and mitigate risks.

Meeting the requirements of this standard

There are various clauses in this standard where there is a requirement to have and retain documented information so even the best run and organised company will still need to review the requirements and make sure they have documented evidence for various things like Management Review, Internal Audits and a Quality Policy.

If you want hands-on help preparing your management system we can introduce you to a consultant from our network of approved ISO consultants. If you would rather set the system up in house, the alphaZ ISO 9001 toolkit gives you the policies, procedures and registers to build it from, and access to the alphaZ documents is included free when you certify with us.

If you would like further information about this standard, the ISO 9001 section of the isomanaged.com knowledge base goes through the standard clause by clause in plain language, setting out what each requirement means in practice and what you need to have in place.

ISO 9001 Certification process

We offer a simple, smart, certification process to provide independent confirmation that your organisation meets the requirements of the ISO 9001 standard and once an audit has been completed with a satisfactory outcome we issue an ISO 9001 registration certificate and authorise the organisation to display our 'ISO 9001 Registered' logo.

Further details on our certification service are available on the ISO Certification page.