ISO 9000 standards in fact are a worldwide compilation of the best quality practices on which everyone has agreed. They are a set of rules for manufacturing a product or delivering a service. They should ensure that a supplier has the capability to produce the required goods or services, showing him how to proceed to make sure that what he delivers fully meets customer expectations. The primary standard deals with manufactured products. Subsidiary standards provide guidelines relating to primary standards, to service industries and specialised products such as software.
Guidelines are also prepared for auditing procedures and competence of auditors.
Most of these technical standards are applied to well- identified end products. They set the requirements for these products in terms of performance, size, safety, etc. It should be remembered that ISO 9000 describes how to go about making sure that a given supplier has the capability of meeting these specific standards and delivering a good quality product or service . It does not guarantee however that this supplier really delivers a product adequate for a precise purpose. A. - Quality cannot be evaluated in a vacuum.