¶ … competitive and global market, it is essential that companies have a means of continually making improvements to their products and services. This is called the total improvement process or quality management system (QMS). A QMS can take a variety of forms in order to consistently meet customer requirements. A QMS offers a number of benefits to an organization: enhanced customer satisfaction and confidence and improved market reputation and market share (Harrington, 1995, p.173). In order to produce a product or service, a company relies on the materials and supplies from a number of vendors. The vendors must meet the same stringent criteria as the company as a whole to meet the customer requirements. It is very difficult for vendors to have different criteria for each company to which they sell. As a result, a group of professionals in the quality field realized that it would be much better if the same criteria could be applied by all companies for consistency and efficiency. In 1946, "delegates from 25 countries met in London and decided to create a new international organization, of which the object would be 'to facilitate the international coordination and unification of industrial standards'. The new organization, ISO, officially began operations on 23 February 1947" (Overview of the ISO system).

The ISO published the first version of the ISO 9000 series standards in the mid-1980s specifically for management systems, or "what the company does to fulfill the customer's quality requirements, and applicable regulatory requirements, while aiming to - enhance customer satisfaction, and achieve continual improvement of its performance in pursuit of these objectives" (Overview of the ISO system). These standards are not written as product or service specific, but rather generic for all industries. Along with...

It consists of the elements of the standard that are applied to all parts of the organization, such as documentation control, training, records and corrective action; The operating system refers to the different parts of the value chain that are within the scope of the standards. These include contract review, design and purchasing; The management support and control system refers to management responsibility and internal quality audits (Harrington, 1995, p.177).
To develop a QMS, a company first asks what does the customer require? Then it asks what does our organization require? The firm must constantly review production to make sure that both requirements are met.

The benefits of the ISO 9000 are varied. They include: Increase access to international markets; Maintain consistently dependable processes; Guarantee less wasted time, materials, and efforts and, more specifically, speed up return on investment, reduce inventory, reduce product cost, decrease lost work days, increase on-time deliveries, reduce credit memos, increase market share, increase overall margin (Harrington, 1995, p.178).

One of the first U.S. companies to apply the ISO 9000 standards was the Foxboro Company, which develops, manufactures, engineers and integrates control systems, analytical instruments and sensing and control devices for process industries. Its products measure and automate processes in industries such as pulp and paper, oil refining, utilities, pharmaceuticals, food products, mining and steel production. It was founded in 1908 and purchased by Siebe of…