Studies reveal that in the recent years, the number of ISO 9001 registrations has decreased substantially. This may be due to fact that there is no difference in terms of the benefits obtained between receiving a certificate and implementing the management system itself without registration. This work would have been carried out by comparing the results of the many studies conducted beforehand. This was however impossible since the methodology and the approach followed in these research works were of diverse nature and the purposes also varied widely. Hence it was decided to carry out an initial field study in which the variation in the benefits and costs of implementing the ISO 9000 standards were analyzed (Casadesus & Karapetrovic, Ref. 1-2). The data were obtained from two empirical surveys in the same geographic region of Spain, namely Catalonia, with 283 companies participating in 1998 (Casadesus & Gimenez, Ref. 3) and with 399 respondents in 2002 (Casadesus & Alberti, Ref. 4). (72refs.)
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