The role of the quality principles on the integration of multiple management systems

Abstract

The International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) established the Quality Management Principles (QMP) as the foundation values aiming at drive the performance improvement of management systems (MS). Since the QMP are transversal to any ISO standard, they also may support the integration of multiple MS (the IMS) and act as the basis for achieving a higher maturity level. The literature reviewed suggests an urgency in developing strategies to handle performance shortcomings of IMS and to facilitate organisations to achieve and operate on high performance levels. Intending to contribute to this matter, the goals of this paper embrace to establish the specific common requirements (SR) amidst ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 standards, and to determine the quantitative efficiency of the QMP for the requirements integration. The data collection was carried out via an online survey, which was designed to be answered by representative experts in the MS and IMS field, and through literature review. Supported on the data collected, the pivotal QMP and the correlated SR were established and their scores: metrics to treat more efficiently the detected non-conformities (i.e. the shortcomings of the integration performance). Further, the results comprise the disclosure of the significant role of the QMP ‘Process Approach’ (in addition to the ‘Leadership’) for the integration. Therefore, the QMP efficiency scores might be adopted as a strategy by any organisation holding an IMS, to efficiently handle the performance limitations.