Dr. Makarand Sawant, Senior General Manager – IT, Deepak Fertilisers and Petrochemicals Corp. Ltd.

The International Standards Organization (ISO) in Geneva has compiled best practices for organizational management and publishes them as International Quality Standards. The most world-wide applicable Standard is ISO-9001.

A growing business must be concerned about ISO because it can boost business.

ISO registered companies have a contract with Registrar for 3 years to audit and confirm they are focused on meeting customer requirements and they measure themselves for continual improvement, effective internal communications, effective training, effective process control, and especially, effective customer satisfaction.

Buying from ISO registered companies improves the scale that you will receive product or service that is fit for your use and gets better over time. No company is perfect all the time, but ISO companies have less delivery problems and the ISO Corrective Action and Internal Audit tools effectively attack problems with an objective for prevention.

ISO registered companies teach employees how to react to unexpected events. Employees are taught to use their experience and judgment to receive or reject and document the incident for management intervention, do their job well, and inspect prior to release to prevent someone from rejecting. Companies that adopt such a concept find that crisis management quickly drops. Unexpected costs to respond to a crisis never get spent. Target profit margins are achieved.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) defines a standard as a "document, established by consensus and approved by a recognized body that provides – for common and repeated use – rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities of their results, aimed at the achievement of the optimum degree of order in a given context."

Standards can serve many purposes, including:

• Determining the fitness of an object or process for a specific purpose and its compatibility and/or interchangeability with other objects or processes

• Ensuring safety

• Protecting the environment

• Protecting products against climatic or other adverse conditions

Organizations use management systems standards to help manage processes or activities so that the outcomes meet established objectives, such as:

• Satisfying customers’ quality requirements

• Complying with regulations

• Meeting environmental objectives

In addition to the ISO 9000 series on quality management, other standards addressing the specialized needs and circumstances of certain industries and applications also exist like AS9100 for Aerospace, ISO 19011 for Auditing, ISO/TS 16949 for ISO/TS 16949 for Automotive, ISO 14001 for Environment, ISO 31000 for Risk management, ISO 26000 for Social responsibility, Statistical.