A management system is a practical tool that helps organizations effectively plan, direct, follow up, and improve their activities. It’s a collection of processes and procedures that, when applied throughout the organization, support continual improvement and help the organization monitor and evaluate compliance with relevant laws, regulations, and standards while working toward its goals.
Unfortunately, it often describes how you want the organization to work, not how it really works.
A management system should be a tool for senior management to ensure that the business is conducted according to established procedures and support employees in their daily work, not a collection of documents that no one reads.
All companies consist of a set of processes that work together to ensure that they achieve their set goals and become successful. These processes include project management, resource management, customer relationships, and more.
Aside from the processes, a management system also encompasses policy, goals, environmental impact, and risks. These components are part of the management system so the company can steer work, follow up results, and improve in a structured way.
What you include in the management system depends on the areas it is built to cover. A management system may cover areas such as quality, environment, or work environment. What you choose to cover depends on your business’s priorities and the requirements of your customers and other stakeholders.
Other areas that management systems commonly cover are information security, energy management, food safety, medical technology, and social responsibility. For most companies, however, the journey usually starts with considerations of quality, the environment, and/or their workplace.
A management system gives structure and helps you improve efficiency while you work toward your objectives.
Imagine if everyone in the organization operated under the same system, continuously improved, hit their targets, and executed your strategy effectively. A well-implemented management system can make this happen.
Analog and digital management systems
Before we discuss how to build a management system or what standards cover, we need to discuss analog and digital management systems.
Too many people are still stuck with a visualization of their management system as a pile of PDFs, documents, and hard-to-work Excel sheets that are just dusted off from the file server during an audit. It is not used daily by all employees and hardly conveys a feeling of “high quality.”
You may think it is wrong to claim that a management system set up in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Visio stored on a file server is an analog system. And in a way, you’re right about that, but it’s not the storage that makes it digital or analog, but the focus on documents that makes it analog.
If you can print it on paper without losing anything in the daily operations except easy access to the documentation, it is still a very analog system.
If we think digitally when establishing the management system, we can use IT tools to create a system that not only meets the requirements of selected standards but also increases efficiency, provides smart ways to collaborate, and constantly improves the organization.
The management system goes from being a description of how things should work to a tool that makes things work.
The management system should be a working tool.
If everything is where the employees are already working, the things will be used. Logical, right?
A digital approach can also cost less, move faster, and give better results.
Transitioning from an analog to a digital management system can feel overwhelming for many, but it is a necessary change to increase productivity and efficiency in the organization.
A digital management system is not a way to store documents; it is a tool used daily by all employees. It provides better insight and understanding of processes, helps identify and resolve issues faster, and provides better opportunities for collaboration and continuous improvement.