The ISO 9000 experts choose the Basque Country to kick off the review of the main quality standard worldwide

The ISO 9000 experts choose the Basque Country to kick off the review of the main quality standard worldwide

- Around fifty professionals entrusted with the review will spend a week meeting in Bilbao in mid June. The review process will last two years.

- The decisions regarding the ISO 9000 impact the trade balance of countries, as there are over 1 million companies and institutions certified pursuant to this standard in over 150 countries worldwide.

- The SPRI, the main public corporation of the Department for Industry, Innovation, Trade and Tourism, has been entrusted with organising the event.

The Technical Committee of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), which sets the most important quality standards around the world, will held its first world meeting to review the ISO 9001 standard in Bilbao. The meeting, which will be held at the headquarters of the SPRI (the Competitive Transformation Company, the business agency of the Department for Industry, Innovation, Trade and Tourism), will aim to develop and review the series of ISO 9000 standards and their key documents, along with their dissemination strategy.

The group that will meet in Bilbao in June consists of 60 professionals selected from the more than 100 countries that make up the network of National Standards Bodies.

A selection process will be needed as there are more applications than places in this select group. The decisions agreed by this group have a great economic impact: they can change the trade capacities of the member countries, such as the decision to include mandatory requirements, which may mean that the products and services of the companies are acceptable or not, and also mean that a country has to stop purchasing from another country that has cheaper production costs but which does not comply with the standard. Direct participation in the working party is thus decisive for some countries and there are even cases where the more powerful countries contract professionals to take part in the review group.

The ISO secretariat is currently chaired by the Canadian delegation through the Canadian Standards Body and the group that will meet in Bilbao by the BSI (British Standards Institute). The Spanish Association for Standardisation (AENOR) will play an active role in this meeting. The participants are not involved full time in the meeting, but are the top executives of companies and institutions.

The Bilbao meeting is the starting point of a review process that will last two years and which will involve holding meetings in different countries of the world alternating with the use of the electronic media.

ISO has produced over 19,000 international standards since it was founded in 1947 and publishes over 1,000 new approval regulations annually. The ISO 9000, the best known standard, is 25 years old and over one million companies around the world have been certified pursuant to that standard over that period. The Spanish standards body publishes over 1500 standards a year and has over 30,000 UNE standards in its catalogue.

ISO

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is the world's largest developer and publisher of international standards.. It is the network of the national standards institutes of 163 countries, one member per country, with a Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, that coordinates the system. ISO is a non-governmental organisations that forms a bridge between the public and private sectors. Many of the institutes are part of the governmental structure of their countries, while others are from the private sector, having been set up by national partnerships of industry associations.