ISO 9001 Guides | Governance Docs

Category: ISO 9001

ISO 9001 is the international standard for quality management systems, and the most widely adopted management-system standard in the world. It applies to any organisation of any size in any sector, because it specifies what a quality management system must achieve rather than how any particular industry should operate.
The 2015 edition is built on the Annex SL high-level structure — clauses 4 to 10, covering context, leadership, planning, support, operation, performance evaluation and improvement — which is why it aligns so cleanly with ISO 27001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 and why integrated management systems are practical.
Two ideas do most of the work: the process approach, which asks you to manage your organisation as a set of interacting processes with defined inputs, outputs and owners; and risk-based thinking, which replaced the preventive-action clause of earlier editions.
ISO 9001 requires fewer mandatory documents than people expect. The scope, the quality policy, the quality objectives and a defined set of records are genuinely required; almost everything else is documentation you keep because it makes the system work.
The guides below cover the clause structure, the mandatory documents and records, how to run an internal audit under clause 9.2, the certification path, and what it costs.