The periodic ISO Survey on management system certifications was published in recent weeks by ISO/CASCO (the ISO Committee for Conformity Assessment) – thanks to the contribution of accredited bodies and IAF CertSearch : a snapshot of their actual diffusion at a global level.
A first look at the numbers – which refer to 2022 – already provides confirmation: ISO 9001:2015 on quality management systems remains in first place, with as many as 1,265,216 certifications and 1,666,172 sites (a “site” is a stable place where an organization carries out its work or provides a service).
Also in second place – albeit at a considerable distance – is ISO 14001:2015 on environmental management systems, which has 529,853 certificates (spread over 744,428 sites).
Respectable numbers also for ISO 45001:2015 on occupational health and safety management systems, which records 397,339 certificates (and just over 512,000 sites).
Quality, environment and safety are therefore confirmed as the general areas in which the certification of conformity to technical standards is less and less optional and, on the contrary, more and more a substantial criterion of reliability on the market.
If we aggregate the data by country, we have another confirmation: Italy is in fact still in second place on a global scale for ISO 9001 certifications (there are 94,216), preceded only by China (with 551,855), ahead of India (61,653) and Germany (47,576).
As far as ISO 14001 certifications are concerned, our country ranks third with 20,294 certificates, almost on a par with Japan (20,892). China is also expected to hold on to first place with 295,501 certificates.
When it comes to ISO 45001, Italy is again in second place (15,255 certifications), again behind China (266,898).
One area in which we have room for improvement is that of cybersecurity: in terms of the number of ISO/IEC 27001 certificates, in fact, our country is “only” in fifth place with 2,424 certifications, preceded by China, Japan, the United Kingdom and India. The same goes for food safety: in terms of the number of ISO 22000 certificates, Italy ranks seventh (with just over a thousand certificates).
The “primacy”, however, is achieved with the certifications of compliance with ISO 39001 on road traffic safety management systems (RTS): there are 670, compared to 134 in Greece and 131 in Spain.
In general terms, all the main standards covered by the ISO Survey recorded an increase in the number of certificates: a growth driven mainly by China.
These are obviously numbers, which therefore provide an eminently quantitative analysis of the certification phenomenon (partly also conditioned by the participation of accredited bodies in the ISO survey) and which can nevertheless be useful to have a general reference framework on the state of health of the standardization-certification chain.
For a complete overview of the certifications, which include many other management systems such as energy (ISO 50001), resilience (or business continuity: ISO 22301), corruption prevention (ISO 37001), event sustainability (ISO 20121), etc., you can consult the full version of the ISO Survey 2022, available on the appropriate web page of the ISO website (www.iso.org/the-iso-survey.html).
