Seeing the Immaterial: A New Instrument for Evaluating Integrated Management Systems’ Maturity

Integrated management systems (IMSs) can already be considered a proven tool to help companies cope with the challenges associated with staying competitive in the face of dynamic stakeholder requirements. The present paper proposes a new instrument designed to evaluate and communicate the maturity achieved by an integrated management system (IMS) for responding properly to the requirements of its reference standards in a consolidated manner. The approach mainly aims to highlight the level of integration achieved on common requirements of the component standards and to determine the extent to which they work together as a whole. At the same time, it is useful to identify the needs for improvement in the system as a whole or in its sub-systems. The proposed methodology uses the transmutation in the RGB color space (red–green–blue) of the process audits’ results achieved under each standard, followed by the analysis of the IMS characteristics, with tools specific to the color space, based on the affinities between the two domains. To sustain the thoroughness of this approach, a case study of an integrated system for an industrial company is presented, analyzing the situation from two different evolution stages of the IMS. The approach is presented as a proof-of-concept, without large scale validation.