What is ISO

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is the world's largest developer and
publisher of International Standards.

ISO is a network of the national standards institutes of 161 countries, one member per
country, with a Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, that coordinates the system.

ISO is a non-governmental organization that forms a bridge between the public and
private sectors. On the one hand, many of its member institutes are part of the
governmental structure of their countries, or are mandated by their government. On the
other hand, other members have their roots uniquely in the private sector, having been set
up by national partnerships of industry associations.

Therefore, ISO enables a consensus to be reached on solutions that meet both the
requirements of business and the broader needs of society.

ISO's name

Because "International Organization for Standardization" would have different acronyms

in different languages ("IOS" in English, "OIN" in French for Organisation
internationale de normalisation), its founders decided to give it also a short, all-purpose
name. They chose "ISO", derived from the Greek isos, meaning "equal". Whatever the
country, whatever the language, the short form of the organization's name is always ISO.

Why standards matter

Standards make an enormous and positive contribution to most aspects of our lives.

Standards ensure desirable characteristics of products and services such as quality,

environmental friendliness, safety, reliability, efficiency and interchangeability - and at
an economical cost.

When products and services meet our expectations, we tend to take this for granted and
be unaware of the role of standards. However, when standards are absent, we soon notice.
We soon care when products turn out to be of poor quality, do not fit, are incompatible
with equipment that we already have, are unreliable or dangerous.
When products, systems, machinery and devices work well and safely, it is often because
they meet standards. And the organization responsible for many thousands of the
standards which benefit the world is ISO.

What's different about ISO 9001 and ISO 14001

The vast majority of ISO standards are highly specific to a particular product, material, or
process. However, ISO 9001 (quality) and ISO 14001 (environment) are "generic
management system standards". "Generic" means that the same standard can be applied
to any organization, large or small, whatever its product or service, in any sector of
activity, and whether it is a business enterprise, a public administration, or a government
department. ISO 9001 contains a generic set of requirements for implementing a quality
management system and ISO 14001 for an environmental management system.

The best way for a business to manage quality is to introduce an effective quality
assurance management system into the enterprise processes and operations which should
be under careful quality control of QA Department. Such a system is concerned with
planning quality control measures, checking and reviewing operations and procedures
that has been done at the enterprise. QA Department operates such major function as
follows:

Development of QA policy. This function assumes development, maintenance and

improvement of tasks and procedures of QA management, QA policy and also quality
control over various projects, production, selling and other activity. Certified procedures
and guides are the basic documentation of QA management system. After all required
documentation for development of QA policy has been combined which is confirmed, for
example, with Standard MS ISO 9001, the quality control will be performed with
reference to and in accordance with the collected documentation.

• Evaluation of quality level. These evaluations are conducted by means of the

original or adopted techniques at the enterprise, in its divisions, branches. The
evaluations can be practical and numerical. The first one is conducted on
 production meetings of experts by means of discussion of certain lines of business
procedures and operations at the enterprise. Numerical evaluation is settled up
mainly on the basis of model Total Quality Management (TQM). Depending on
the evaluation type the management makes decisions on measures for
improvements of procedures and operations. Results of regular estimations are
necessary for documenting.
• Internal and external audit . This function assumes internal and external audit
of the quality management system and quality assurance in divisions and
enterprise services. It is possible to tell that this is the most important function. It
is a feedback of quality control system. It is a point that distinguishes a modern
quality management based on Standard MS ISO 9000 and TQM from all previous
models.
• Documentation. The function is aimed to create and keep documents on the
projects for formalizing task and processes, keeping statistics and getting lessons
learnt. The enterprise can quickly get valued information and use it to make
correction to ongoing activity and improve quality management.

In accordance with the mentioned functions QA Department builds its workflow and
manages tasks of the employees. The instance of the usual workflow can be built on the
following processes:

1. Identifying what checks and arrangements are required

2. Preliminary checking components/ingredients/materials
3. Checking components
4. Checking packaging materials
5. Checking packed products
6. Customer support

Each of the processes is divided into tasks which are assigned to employees of QA
Department. For example, the process "Checking components" can be divided into such
task list as "Component 1", "Component 2", "Component 3", and so on. QA Manager
assigns QA Specialists to these tasks, set task due dates and priorities.