The most effective method to grow a business and create sustainable growth is by implementing systems. The process of organising your company’s operations will give everyone a clear idea of what they are expected to do which allows them to step out of management and tactical positions and achieve real results while ensuring that they are accountable. However, this requires a framework that enables you to write down the rules for your business, so that routine tasks can take care of themselves, freeing up time to concentrate on the work that matters most. A management system for your company is designed to accomplish this purpose.
The purpose of a management system is to create an array of policies, procedures, and guidelines that ensures all the functions of a business are performed according to best practice. These are designed to help achieve many corporate goals including improving operational efficiency and financial success, customer relationships as well as product quality, environmental performance, worker safety and compliance with the law.
These are typically built on the PDCA cycle and involve creating processes that document, review and implement improvements to existing methods in a planned manner. Some of these are also designed to meet the requirements of a specific standard, like ISO 9001 for quality management, ISO 14001 for sustainability or ISO 27001 for information security.
A quality company management system should be user-friendly and accessible to all employees. This could be in the form of a lightweight application that allows anyone to easily edit and publish new workflows or high-quality documents, or it could simply be making a company process map accessible via an intranet. It is essential to be able to upgrade the system quickly so that it reflects current business practices. This minimizes the possibility of it becoming outdated, a problem which is a common occurrence with more formalized manuals and software applications that require specialised skills to maintain.