ABSTRACT
There are 20 elements or clauses that make up the core of the ISO 9001 standard. The differences in 9001 - 9003 are illustrated in Table 5-1.
5.1 Historical Perspective
Increasing development in world trade made a common set of universally accepted quality standards inevitable. Using guidelines already established by military and defense industries several companies began to implement quality management systems in the early 1970's. As use of these systems grew, many of the companies got together in the late 1970's to review the various approaches used. The result was the first publication of BS 5750: 1979 which allowed for the first time a common base for auditing,
In the years that followed considerable input from the US, Canada and the UK led to the ISO 9000 series published in 1987. Within 5 years more than 55 countries had adopted their own equivalent national standard The US adopted ANSI!ASQC Q90, the UK had BS 5750, and the European Community Standard was EN 29000. In order to address some of the inadequacies in the original publication the ISO 9000 series was revised in 1994.
