Integrated Management System

Improving organization's productivity is linked not only to overall profitability objectives but also to keep employees motivated. In the past several months, various productivity improvement efforts haven't made much progress. This called for an investigation at the organizational level.

Key findings

With your support, a cross functional task force was formed to understand the root cause of the problem. After speaking with various stakeholders, the task force concluded the following:

* In year 2010 our organization observed four audits for ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 management systems. Each audit took 3-4 days

* Two separate management systems (ISO 9001 and ISO 14001) call for duplication of documentation work and in certain cases result in conflicting objectives

* Repeated auditing distracted employees and caused loss of productive work days. A day spent on auditing is a day not spent on productive work

Way forward: Integrated Management System

After carefully reviewing these findings with an external auditing team, we concluded that ISO 9001 & 14001 management systems have a lot of common aspects. Management is convinced combining ISO 9001 & 14001 to form an integrated management system (IMS) will improve productivity.

Key benefits of integrated management system:

* Ensure consistent procedures and align all functions towards one common goal: improving productivity of the entire organization

* Reduce the number of audits and documentation required

* Help employees focus on work and improve productivity

Actions required

A core team is formed under the leadership of Jane Huang, Director Quality, to ensure effective implementation of IMS throughout the organization. To help this management initiative you are requested to:

* Nominate two members from your function for a three day training session on IMS scheduled next week

* List all procedures within your department and their interrelation with other departments. A template shall be provided to you for your convenience. Please ensure this list is handed over to the IMS core team by the end of this month

Through the proposed integrated management system we hope to accelerate improvements in organization's productivity.