The secret of ISO 9001

摘要

The first standards in the ISO 9000 series were published 20 years ago in 1987. It was four or five years later that I had my first contact with them. Not long before I joined ISO in 1992,1 was working for a public relations company and had to draft a press release for a multinational client on the ISO 9000 certification (I can't remember whether it was to ISO 9001, ISO 9002 or ISO 9003) of one of its factories. When the client briefed me on ISO 9000,1 initially made the mistake of seeing it as some sort of guarantee of product quality. The client corrected me by saying that it was "all about the quality of our paperwork" - which made me wonder why the client was so proud of the certification that the company wanted a press release.