The management systems and the performance indicators: the integration way

Abstract

The last decade has seen the worldwide proliferation of management systems standards, preceded by a period of nearly twenty years where the quality assurance systems, which evolved later to quality management systems, were the only ones. This diversity of standards accompanied the organizations changing needs in the optimization of its subsystems and systematization of management promoted by market imperatives, customer, statutory regulations, the dictates of regulators of the sector, as well as by concerns of efficiency improvements and operational control. This implied a systematic orientation towards integration of the different management systems. However, in Portugal, after a decade of coexistence of various subsystems, the effective integration is not a current reality. In addition, overlapping and partial integration continues to prevail, either through lack of knowledge or incapacity of those who run the systems, either by structural difficulties of the organizations or even top management options. However, stakeholders learning process - leaders of organizations, consulting, certification or normalization entities - although with rhythms and different approaches, led to a significant development, both in the aspect of regulatory harmonization and consolidation of intra-organizational practices, as well as use of monitoring tools and performance indicators from the perspective of systems optimization in the service of an appropriate response to the increasing demands of the dynamics of current management. The data collection methodology used in this study was supported by a set of semi-structured interviews. The results obtained constitute the scope of the analyses and the conclusions of this publication, with crossing findings to other published studies in this domain. Important findings of this study are that there is not a unique methodology for integration and that there is still an inefficient use of KPI systems for decision support, mainly within the integrated systems. The critical success factors towards the integration of management systems are essentially inner motivation for the integration and top management commitment as well as competent and professional organization governance, regardless the sectors involved.