Why ISO 9001 as starting point?

The international nature of ISO 9001 has already been identified; and, in fact, ISO 9001 is such a basic and influential standard that it is used as the basis when industry groups want to add specific industry requirements, thus creating their own industry standard. These include AS9100 for the aerospace industry, ISO 13485 for the medical devices industry and ISO/TS 16949 for the automotive industry.

ISO 9001 is also a good foundation for implementing many other management standards, such as ISO 14001 for environmental management and ISO 20000 for IT service management, which follow much of the same structure and organization. ISO 9001 is the start of good things for the company’s efforts to gain better process control and improvement. By implementing the gains available through an ISO 9001 quality management system, the organization can build to even higher savings and improvements.