Management systems standards

29 Feb Management systems standards

To help improve overall efficiency and market competitiveness, organizations have been increasingly adopting and implementing multiple management systems standards (MSSs). This trend is visible from the increase in the number of most widely adopted standards such as quality and environmental management standards. We found the implementation of several standardized certifications in different organizations such as OHSAS 18001 for workplace health safety, SA 8000 and ISO 20000 for service management systems (SMS), ISO26000 for corporate social responsibility (CSR), ISO 27001 for information security, and ISO 10000 series for ensuring customer satisfaction. These typically build on prior efforts of standards such as ISO 9000 and continuous innovation efforts to improve firm performance (Latan, Jabbour, de Sousa Jabbour, de Camargo Fiorini, and Foropon, 2019).

Add to this the significance of MSSs proliferation is the advancement regarding their enactment. A review of the earlier studies by researchers such as (Simon et al., 2012b; Rebelo et al., 2016; Mustapha et al., 2017) have exposed this development and found that counties with a high rate of MSSs application (European Union) will soon experience a saturation point. On a country level, those that have recently promoted MSSs implementation see the spread of certificates in their early stages, and this trend will only continue to increase. These efforts to enable MSSs contributes to knowledge management, and new frameworks for enhancing public sector performance (Al-Ahbabi, Singh, Gaur, and Balasumbramanian, 2017), but do not come without some resistance to change.

Several factors have been limiting the process of integration and, simultaneously, the benefits of these systems. A relatively important factor among these is the type of model used during implementation. Some models have been considered incompatible by Nunhes et al. (2017). Others suggest that proper motivation of human resources plays a vital role in the process (Domingues et al., 2016; Domingues et al., 2015; Simon et al., 2012a; Sroufe, 2017). Also important is the order of processes in implementation (Ikram et al., 2019; de Oliveira, 2013). These factors work as difficulties for the process of integration and they can bring heterogeneous effects in different organizations. Overcoming these difficulties is the goal of organizations with many management system strategies in hand, as they implement these policies for the better management of the organization and ultimately the exploitation of related synergies (Asif et al., 2013a; Zutshi and Sohal, 2005; Samani et al., 2019).

Reference

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