In 2014, 1,138,155 companies and other organisations had a certified quality management system based on the ISO 9001 standard, and 324,148 organisations had an ISO 14001-certified environmental management system. The new ISO 9001: 2015 Quality management systems - requirements helps ensure that customers get consistent, good quality products and services. And the new ISO 14001: 2015 Environmental management systems - requirements with guidance for use can provide assurance to company management and employees as well as external stakeholders that environmental impact is being measured and improved. The measures to achieve this prescribed by both standards are quite similar.
Aligning management standards
Many organisations use both standards and then may consider to combine and integrate the two management systems, for example when defining processes, training employees or internal auditing. The more the two standards are aligned, the easier this gets.
Meanwhile, even more management standards have been added to ISO’s portfolio, for example occupational health and safety management, energy management, information security management and business continuity management. “The better the alignment between these standards, the easier it will become to implement two or more of them,” said Dr Henk de Vries, who is also president of the European Academy for Standardization (EURAS).
International guidelines
Dr Henk de Vries and Dick Hortensius from the Netherlands Standardization Institute NEN thought about a common structure for management system standards about 20 years ago. Together, they wrote a discussion document which lead to an international guide on how to develop management system standards, entitled Guidelines for the justification and development of management system standards. Dr De Vries also wrote a scientific paper entitled Opportunities for Better Management Systems Standards in which he showed what a common structure for management system standards could look like.
Generic management system framework
More than a decade later, ISO decided to build on this work, and now a ‘high-level structure’ for management systems is available and applied in all new and revised management system standards. This framework is for a generic management system and the blueprint for all new and revised management system standards going forward. To address industry-specific needs, additional requirements for individual sectors can be added to this generic framework. The structure is not identical to the one initially proposed but the essence is the same. The revision of the standards will impact the more than one million organisations that have implemented one or more of these standards, and this number continues to grow year by year.
