The ISO 9000 standards were intended to be advisory in nature and were developed primarily for use in two-party contractual situations or for internal auditing. However, the standards are currently being applied under a much broader range of conditions and circumstances. In some cases, compliance with one of the ISO 9000 standards has been or will be mandated by a U.S., foreign national, or regional government body. Conformance to ISO 9000 standards is also being required in purchasing specifications with increasing frequency.
The ISO 9000 has been adopted in the United States as the ANSI/American Society for Quality Control (ASQC) Q 90 Series. In Europe, it has been adopted by the European committee for standardization (CEN) and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) as the European Norm (EN) 29000 Series. According to a recent survey by ISO 67 countries have national standards that are being adopted globally for quality systems are the ISO 9000 standards.
ISO 9002 ( ANSI /ASQC Q 91) , Quality Systems - Model for Quality Assurance in Production and Installation, addressed the prevention, detection and correction of problems during production and installation. It is more extensive and more sophisticated than ISO 9003.
