ISO 9000 is a family of standards for quality management systems. ISO 9000 is maintained by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization and is administered by accreditation and certification bodies. The rules are updated, the time and changes in the requirements for quality, motivate change. Recently, on November 15, 2008, has made changes to the requirements of ISO 9001.

Some of the requirements in ISO 9001 (which is one of the standards in the ISO 9000 family) include

• a set of procedures that cover all key processes in the business;
• monitoring processes to ensure they are effective;
• keeping adequate records;
• checking output for defects, with appropriate and corrective action where necessary;
• regularly reviewing individual processes and the quality system itself for effectiveness; and
• facilitating continual improvement

A company or organization that has been independently audited and certified to be in conformance with ISO 9001 may publicly state that it is "ISO 9001 certified" or "ISO 9001 registered". Certification to an ISO 9001 standard does not guarantee any quality of end products and services; rather, it certifies that formalized business processes are being applied.

The AS9100 standard is broken out into five sections (numbered 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8). Section 4 of the standard describes how to document a management system and control records. Section 5 is about management commitment and responsibilities, and review of data collected by the management system. Section 6 is resource management; Section 7 is planning, producing and controlling whatever product or service the company provides.

Section 8 of the standard is about monitoring and measuring product processes and management processes through inspection, testing, validation and auditing, for example. In addition, Section 8 defines what to do when processes do not meet the desired result; these are control of nonconformance and corrective action. Section 8 ends by describing analysis of data and preventive action, and this small part of the standard is where an AS9100 system can really pay off. If a company is spending a lot of time conducting processes that generate data, but does not analyze that data, set objectives and goals, and act on preventive action opportunities to improve its bottom line, then it is a waste of time to collect the data in the first place.

 AS9100, just as ISO 9001:2008 has 3 main objectives:

            Consistent Product Quality

            Customer Satisfaction

            Continuous Improvement

This is done through the process of Plan, Do , Check, Act