ABSTRACT
The standards provide guidance and tools for companies and organizations who want to ensure that their products and services consistently meet customer's requirements, and that quality is consistently improved. This chapter provides an overall appreciation of the range of standards and in particular: the identity of the standards that make up the ISO 9000 family; the characteristics of the core standards in the ISO 9000 family; the relationship between the standards to illustrate how they are used; the basis and purpose of the requirements; summary of the management requirements and summary of the assurance requirements. The requirements of ISO 9001 are claimed to have been based on set of seven quality management principles However, they have not been derived from them, as the requirements have evolved in parallel over many decades, and the principles were only defined for the 2000 version.
