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Many organizations are certified to various management system standards. Typically, these systems are operated and maintained by their respective functional groups (e.g., safety, environment, quality).
Although these systems may function in conformity with the same core principles, they often operate autonomously within the organization.
Having spent most of my career involved in management systems, it is clear to me that deploying management systems separately for quality, safety, environment, energy and more does not make good business sense. Many businesses that follow the traditional organizational architecture of distinct separation between operational and functional staff responsibilities, objectives, performance measures and data, and accountabilities often suffer some degree of inefficiency and dysfunction. Separate and redundant systems increase the distance between values, data and people that are often focused independently on the success of the organization.
Consider the following from Trevor (2018):
Multiple different individuals and groups are responsible for different components of the value chain that makes up their company's design, and they are often not as joined up as they should be. All too often, individual leaders seek-indeed are incen-tivized-to protect and optimize their own domains, and find themselves locked in energy-sapping internal turf wars, rather than working with peers to align and improve across the entire enterprise.
Organizations and their leaders should be fostering a more unifying and streamlined approach to their organizational design. This future state of organizational design should be supported by an organizational management system (OMS): essentially, one system connecting all functional and operational expectations that drives balanced decisions and sustainable value realization.
This article represents knowledge learned from our work in the area of organizational health and management system improvement. It offers insight into the challenges of operating separate systems, advantages of an OMS and incremental success opportunities created in merging common system elements. OSH professionals with a solid understanding of system and process effectiveness (Susca, 2018; 2019) can use safety to blaze a trail toward the unification of functional management system elements. If effectively implemented, these efforts can show measurable operational improvement from the executive team to the frontline workforce.
Multiple System Inefficiency
All management systems are built on the same foundational elements that function within a continual improvement cycle (e.g., plan-do-check-act). This cycle of improvement follows the same core...