Management systems

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Management systems credentials

A management system is, or should be, simple. It should enable an organisation to manage its risks and maximise its opportunities, whether those risks and opportunities have an environmental, health, safety, social, economic or quality flavour. It should be founded on the basic process of "plan > do > check > act". It should be easy to maintain, easy to change and easy to knowledge-transfer (for example, when the system manager leaves).

Integrated management systems

When developing a management system, it can be superficially attractive to do so on a subject-by-subject basis: ie develop one to manage quality issues first, then expand that to encompass health and saftey issues, then environmental issues and so on. The development all-at-once of an integrated management system - ie a system that integrates the management elements required to address any and all of quality, environment, health and safety, sustainability - can, however, be highly resource-effective. In other words, it's ultimately quicker, cheaper and less time-consuming.

An integrated management system can be broadly summarised as in this diagram:

An integrated management system

The system is top-and-tailed by system-wide elements such as the manual and policy; procedures on training, monitoring and audit; and a review process. Within this, the system is then broken out into individual subject streams, where there may be procedures covering change control (for quality), risk assessment (for health and safety) and sustainable design management (for sustainability).

Clearly, there is no one system that fits the needs of every organisation. A logical case could be made, for example, for removing the health and safety stream from the diagram because it forms an essential sub-set of the sustainability stream. Similarly, many organisations may want to replace the sustainability stream with an environmental one.

Whatever the structure of management system that your organisation wants, Lambert/rubicon can help. See the Credentials page for examples of work that Lambert/rubicon has undertaken or go to the About page to contact Lambert/rubicon.

Formal management systems

A formal management system takes the basic process of "plan > do > check > act" and adds a layer of documentation and verification to enable a third-party organisation to certify that the system meets a specified standard. There are a number of formal management system specifications or guidance documents, but the ones with which Lambert/rubicon has experience are (in alphabetical order):

Lambert/rubicon can help you to ensure that your management system meets the requirements of any of these specifications or guidelines. See the Credentials page for examples of organisations for which Lambert/rubicon has developed certified management systems or go to the About page to contact Lambert/rubicon.