IMS?three into onewill go!: the advantages of a single integrated quality, health and safety, and environmental management system

The three standards for the management of quality, the environment and health and safety (International Standardization Organization (ISO) 9001—ISO 14001—Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Specification (OHSAS) 18001) contain the same basic disciplines, and a general common structure that can be integrated quite easily. Combining them into a simple and cohesive integrated management system (IMS) introduces a considerable cost advantage, and also has a beneficial effect on the culture of the organization, in that it promotes less departmental ‘isolation’, and more of a team ethic between the various functions. This brief paper will show that for any organization looking to implement a formal environmental or health and safety system, the simplest route is via integration, using the existing systems as a base. Some certification bodies, such as the British Standards Institution (BSI), now perform integrated assessments, which means that instead of three separate system assessments to maintain certification, an organization needs only one, cutting the cost of external audits by a third.