The ISO standards (
Organisation internationale de normalisation, it's a French thing, but they're headquartered in Geneva) are standards developed for the standardization of materials, manufacture of products and the provision of services. When the large majority of products or services in a particular business or industry conform to specific International Standards, a state of industry-wide standardization can be said to exist. They do that by consensus agreements between various national delegations representing people involved (there's like 150 countries involved in the decision-making process), like suppliers, end users, and even governments. They agree on specifications and criteria to be applied consistently in the classification of materials, manufacture and services. By doing so, ISO provide a reference framework, or a common technological language, between suppliers and their customers, which facilitates trade and the transfer of technology.
Basically that means that certain things are done a certain way, so that life is easier. For example, "dock high" means dock high, and if the loading docks are built to some "dock high" standard, and the trucks are also built to the same "dock high" standard, viola!, an industry standard definition of "dock high" is achieved, and life is good.
There is, I'm sure an ISO Standard for dock high (there are, like, I dunno, 15,000 different ISO standards out there, with probably 1000 new ones added each year). Each ISO standard is assigned a number. One that I'm intimately familiar with, for example, is
IS0 9660 (soon to be replaced with
ISO 13490), which defines the file system, layout and physical characteristics of the CD ROM disc. Just because a company who builds CD ROMs builds them to the
ISO 9660 standards, does not necessarily mean that they will, or have to, conform to any of the other 15,000 ISO standards that are out there. All it means is that the CD ROMs they build can be read in a CD ROM player that was built to read CD ROM's that were manufactured to the
ISO 9660 standards. But the manufacturing plant itself may or may not be dock high, as that's (almost certainly) covered in a different ISO standard.
Another one, the First One, is
ISO 1. Due to thermal expansion and contraction, precise length and width measurements of most any geometrical object will need to be made at a precise temperature, or the measurements then be converted to some precise, standard temperature, so that everyone will know what the heck is going on. If you have a metal plate with a one-inch hole and you want to put a metal one-inch peg into that hole, you don't want the peg manufactured at 30 degrees F, if you're going to be inserting the peg into the hole on a hot day when it's 90 degrees F outside, because that one-inch peg is gonna expand when it warms up and it won't fit into the hole. Enter
ISO 1, which defines standard temperature for geometric product specification and verification to be exactly 20 degrees C, or 68 degrees F. That way, all measurements for an object will be the same at the same temperature. I gotta tell ya, there's nothing worse than trying to pound a non-standard peg into a standard hole.
In trucking, and many other service industries, you'll see many of them using
ISO 9001:2000 as a marketing tool (if they have been so certified). The
ISO 9000 "family" of standards were developed for manufacturing, and defines primarily quality management, and the sub-numbers, like 2000 (there are a bunch of them) further defines certain things. In the case of
ISO 9001:2000, more than a manufacturing quality management thing, it defines a "process management" thing where the monitoring and optimizing of a company's tasks and activities, instead of just inspecting the final product or service, is the main deal. The 2000 version also requires involvement by upper executives, in order to integrate quality into the business system and avoid delegation of quality functions to lower and middle management. Performance metrics are used to track the effectiveness of tasks and activities. (For example, if a performance metric is assigned to Panther's telephone system, it's a really low number, and it isn't movin' up very fast). Expectations of the continual process involvement and the tracking customer satisfaction are explicitly outlined in Standards.
Basically the
ISO 9001:2000 specifications is more about you being certified to run certain aspects of your business. You have to map out all key processes in your company; control them by monitoring, measurement and analysis; and ensure that product quality objectives are met. If you can’t monitor a process by measurement, then you have to make sure the process is well enough defined that you can make adjustments if the product does not meet user needs. All processes are tediously recorded and, if possible, measured. (
"This conversation may be recorded for quality assurance," is a small part of
ISO 9001:2000 certification and compliance). Decisions about the quality system are made based on recorded data and the system is regularly audited and evaluated for conformance and effectiveness.
So,
ISO 9001:2000 is more about how "on top" of quality the management is, whether that be for a manufactured product or for a service, and that certain procedures are used to track and improve the quality. It's about good management practices with the aim of ensuring that the company can repeatedly deliver the product or services that meet the customer's quality requirements. That's why businesses often use
"We are ISO 9001:2000 Certified!" as a marketing tool, because it goes to the reputation of the business.
So, yeah, businesses that are ISO Certified have to conform to international standards, but only to those ISO standards for which they are certified. It's the methods by which you run your business and make decisions, not so much about the decisions themselves. You can be ISO certified and make some really bad decisions.
