Integrated management systems: moving from function to organisation/decision view

Abstract

Purpose

The integration of management systems is a common need nowadays, thus several paradigms exist in the bibliography for relevant efforts. However, the basic effort seems to be mainly at the direction of aligning processes and documents, taking into account only one of four typical views of organisations' modelling (the function view). Since the function view has been widely studied, this paper aims to focus on the organisation/decision view.

Design/methodology/approach

The proposed approach focuses on the integrated management system (IMS) with respect to the organisation/decision view and offers a control mechanism which guarantees that requirements from all standards will be taken into consideration, while it proposes the use of a well‐known multi‐criteria decision making technique to support the decision makers. The paper focuses on the organisation/decision view, illustrated through a real case from the chemical industry.

Findings

It is concluded that the integration of management sub‐systems into one IMS should be done with respect to each one of the four enterprise modelling views, namely function, information, resource and organisation/decision view.

Research limitations/implications

The proposed approach is general and can be applied to many integrated systems where decisions have to be taken. However, the selection of the analytic network process as a decision support tool implies that the decision involves both qualitative and quantitative criteria. In cases where only qualitative or only quantitative criteria exist, another decision support tool may be superior.

Originality/value

The originality of the paper stems from the consideration of the organisation/decision view rather than the function view that mostly appears in literature.

Citation

Leopoulos, V., Voulgaridou, D., Bellos, E. and Kirytopoulos, K. (2010), "Integrated management systems: moving from function to organisation/decision view", The TQM Journal, Vol. 22 No. 6, pp. 594-628. https://doi.org/10.1108/17542731011085302