Javier Garcia
General Director of UNE and Vice President of ISO
A production error, a delay in delivery or an unresolved claim has consequences for any company. They generate costs and can compromise the relationship with your customers. Managing quality helps prevent these problems, understand why they occur, and improve the way you work. Forty years later, that need remains the same, although technology, markets and customer demands have changed profoundly.
To achieve this, organizations need to know their processes, define who is responsible for each task and check whether the results respond to expectations. They must also detect where they fail and act to prevent problems from recurring. This set of practices, organized and subject to continuous review, constitutes a quality management system.
In this sense and on a global scale, ISO 9001 establishes the requirements to develop this system. It is the international standard that offers a common reference that can be applied from a small company to a multinational and a hospital or a university. Its objective is to help organizations improve their performance and offer products and services that consistently meet the requirements of their customers and those that are applicable to them.
Since its first publication in 1987, it has become the world’s leading reference in quality management. It has more than one million certificates issued in 189 countries and, together with ISO 14001 for environmental management, it is one of the international standards most recognized by companies. This extension allows organizations from different countries and sectors to share criteria on how to manage quality in any corner of the planet.
The new ISO 9001:2026 responds to the changes that companies have experienced since its last version published in 2015. Supply chains connect more organizations and customers have more information and channels to compare offers and express their demands. It may seem like a short time, but in a decade
completely changed the environment in which organizations operate. The way of managing quality must also adapt to this new reality.
This change in context also forces us to expand the way we understand quality. It is no longer limited to the final result of a product or service, but affects the entire organization. How decisions are made, how risks are managed, how it relates to suppliers and customers and how a consistent way of working is guaranteed in increasingly complex environments.
Digitalization and the growing incorporation of artificial intelligence into work processes also add new variables that organizations must be able to manage without losing sight of reliability and trust. In this scenario, having shared criteria facilitates relationships between organizations and contributes to generating trust in increasingly interconnected markets.
Precisely in this context, the new edition of ISO 9001 reinforces some of the elements that determine how quality is managed within organizations. Among the main novelties of the standard, a greater emphasis on leadership, quality culture and ethical behavior stands out. In practice, this means that management assumes responsibility for the quality of work. This translates into very specific questions: what goals you set, what resources you provide, and how you respond when a problem is detected.
Because, forty years later, talking about quality still means something very simple. Being able to consistently deliver what an organization has committed to. What has changed is the environment in which you must achieve it. And precisely for this reason ISO 9001 also evolves.