With the Trio of Standards Now Complete, What Does the Future Hold for Integrated Management Systems?

The world of standardized management systems is traversing exciting changes with the publishing of the long-awaited ISO standard for occupational health and safety, ISO 45001. It comes to join ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 to form a trio of highly compatible best practice references of interest for many companies that want to become more competitive, especially from the manufacturing sector. For the past at least 20 years there have been many debates and studies on how to best go about using these standards together to set up an integrated management system. Of course, things seem easier now, but together with the benefits, there are also challenges to manage and some are quite significant. This paper discusses the implications of reaching this milestone and presents the results of a focus-group made among production oriented companies, that was aimed at probing the stakeholder community regarding its positioning in the new context. The focus is on the impact of the new regulations upon creating or upgrading an integrated management system, where relationships among components are the key to a successful implementation and to obtaining results.