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These Standards exist because many large organisations will not buy from suppliers who cannot give them assurance that they have systems which support quality. These large organisations include Government Defense Departments, Health Departments, car manufacturers such as Ford, Toyota, and General Motors, and Aerospace companies such as Boeing and Lockheed.

Until the mid 1980's these large organisations published their own standards or codes for suppliers to follow, and their staff would audit supplier companies regularly to make sure they followed the code. It was not unusual for a supplier to be audited separately by a number of larger customers, all with their own quality system codes. In some instances suppliers hosted 30 or 40 quality system audits a year from all their major customers. To reduce the number of audits to which individual suppliers were subjected, the International Organisation for Standards (ISO) published a series of standards in 1987 known as ISO 9000. Most large purchasing organisations accepted this worldwide standard and ceased to issue their own codes. They also ceased carrying out their own audits and accepted the findings of independent audit companies engaged by supplier companies to check their systems against the ISO 9000 standards. This allowed supplier companies to reduce the number of audits to two or three per yea