The integrated management systems development (Part 2)

 

In this post I continue with this story about how integrated management systems have been developed, with the information I gathered in those years.

There was an interesting fact that caused a big commotion in the standardization world, related to the growing interest in ISO 9000 standards. As far as I remember, it was in 1996, the year that ISO 14000 standards were published, and 1997, that a survey was conducted in thousands of companies, about 5000, from several European countries, which at that time were already certified in ISO 9000. This survey was to determine if the standard under which each company had been certified, whether it was ISO 9001, ISO 9002 or ISO 9003, it was corresponding to the activities those companies actually performed. The result that was obtained, terrible for the expectations that were had for these schemes, was that of the companies certified in ISO 9000, most of them, about 70%, had been erroneously certified as to the corresponding standard, and practically in all cases, the mistake was about a model with fewer requirements than they should. In most of these cases, they were companies that had obtained their certification under the ISO 9002 model, when in fact they should be assigned to the ISO 9001 model. This meant that many companies that carried out design activities on their products did not include the design/ development control requirement in their quality management systems, in order to facilitate their certification/ registration process, a situation that was a serious problem.

These results, which for many people simply meant that they were errors of appreciation, even if in that case they were at three levels, in terms of the companies that established them, for the certification/ registration bodies and also for the accreditation agencies, for ISO, this situation had represented a massive fraud in the application and certification/ registration of these standards and that should be corrected.

The solution found by the ISO, through its Technical Committee No. 176, was to make a new revision of these standards in order to introduce some improvements in the standards, facilitate their understanding and applicability, as well as reduce the possibility of fraud in their schemes of application and certification. This led to the publication of the third version of these standards, in December of the year 2000, in which the quality assurance models were cancelled, so that a single standard of requirements for quality management systems remained, the ISO 9001, establishing a conceptual model of quality management and a series of principles of quality management, improving the presentation, description and applicability of the requirements and including the system improvement element, to cover all the elements of Quality management. This standard was already oriented, finally, to the application of integrated systems, and contained an annex where it established a requirement correspondence between ISO 9001 and ISO 14001.

While these adjustments to ISO 9000 standards were being carried out, the companies that had applied the two standards of management, quality and environmental systems were finding that the requirements of ISO 14001 led them to duplicate some management elements, and some other elements had some different characteristics than those of the quality management system. Perhaps the clearest examples of  this requirement duplication was the case of the quality manual, which was a key requirement of the ISO 9000 documentation, with the environmental management manual, which was also a requirement of the ISO 14001 standard. In the same way, both families of standards included a group of three standards each family, the ISO10011:1990 with three parts of it (let´s remember that the standards considered as  "technology support for quality systems" of the ISO 9000 Family are published with 10,000 numbering), and the ISO14010:1996, ISO 14011:1996 and 14012:1996 establishing both groups basic audit principles, criteria and practices, and providing guidelines for establishing, planning, carrying out and documenting audits, qualification criteria for auditors and management of audit programmes, each one for its management system; 

This generated a multitude of complaints from companies that tried to apply both environmental and quality management systems, due to the complexity that was been created. The ISO promoted that the two technical committees, Nos. 186 and 207, work together so that both standards handle those common elements to facilitate the implementation of both systems avoiding confusion or elements duplication. For this, in October of 2002 it was published a new standard, the ISO 19011:2002 Guidelines for quality and/or environmental management systems auditing, which provided guidance on the principles of auditing, managing audit programmes, conducting quality management system audits and environmental management system audits, as well as guidance on the competence of quality and environmental management system auditors, emerging then the first combined standard to facilitate the establishment of an integrated system, between quality and environmental management systems.

It was applicable to all organizations needing to conduct internal or external audits of quality and/or environmental management systems or to manage an audit programme. And then began the revision of the ISO 14001 standard, whose new version was published in 2004. The main changes for this version, was that it considered a conceptual model similar to that incorporated in the ISO 9001 standard and that it already considered the application of this system in an integrated way.

Pointing out the importance of these standards, and according to ISO data, by now there are more than 1´000,000 certifications to ISO 9001 standard and 300,000 certifications to ISO 14001 standard, in 171 countries around the world.

At that time the following management system standards, ISO 20000 and ISO 22000, were already in development. The ISO 22000 standard established a scheme compatible with ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 standards, however this compatibility did not occur in that time with ISO 20000.

In November 2011, ISO published the ISO 19011: 2011 - Guidelines for auditing management systems, opening the possibility of auditing integrated systems through joint audits, when an audit covers more than one management system standard, as well as combined audits, when it is executed by more than one audit team.

From that moment on, the different ISO management system standards committees took great care that the structures of the following management system standards were correlated, which they called Annex L and later Annex SL. This Annex SL uses a high level structure, which is common to all the standards of management systems, which facilitates interpretation. The auditors, above all, will be the first beneficiaries of the contents of Annex SL. The ten chapters identified in Annex SL of ISO are the following:

 

• Scope.

• Normative references.

• Terms and definitions.

• Context of the organization.

• Leadership.

• Planning.

• Support for.

• Operation.

• Performance evaluation.

• Improvements

 

The HLS concept is that management system standards are structured in the same way, regardless of the domain of the application.

Thus, new management system standards were emerging, currently all developed under the high level structure, including, in addition to the aforementioned ISO 9000 and ISO 14000:

 

• ISO 20000 of information technologies,

• ISO 22000 food safety

• ISO 27000 information security

• ISO 45001 occupational health and safety

 

And so many more management system standards have been generated, such as risks, records, knowledge, water efficiency, anti-bribery, and dozens more. It is a growing scheme, as you will appreciate. Therefore, the integration of management systems should be considered of high relevance by any productive organization.

That is why we can now visualize a standardized management system:

 

It is very important that we prepare ourselves on these issues, which will have an exponential application growth in organizations throughout the planet.

 

Author:

Ernesto Palomares Hilton