The ISO 9001 – 2015 Quality Management Systems – Requirements standard sets out the criteria for a quality management system, and can be used to assess an organisation’s ability to meet customer and regulatory requirements. It is the standard against which third party registration or certification can be achieved. This standard originally came into existence in 1987. It has been revised four times since then-in 1994, 2000, 2008 and 2015. The 2015 version is the fifth edition of ISO 9001 Quality Management Systems – Requirements. Currently, there are over a million organisations in over 170 countries certified to the requirements of this standard.1
ISO 9001:2015 was published in September 2015. For those organisations which are certified to ISO 9001:2008, there is a three year transition period, starting from September 2015 to get certified to ISO 9001:2015. That means they have time till September 15, 2018 to make the transition. Those who fail to do so, would have to go through an entirely new audit and registration process.