The best way to develop a business and create sustainable growth is through systems. Incorporating processes into your business gives everyone a clear understanding about what they are expected to accomplish, allowing them to step away from managerial and tactical positions and produce real results and be accountable for their actions. This requires a system that lets you to write down the rules of your business‘ so that routine tasks can be handled themselves and free up time for the important work. This is the goal of a management system for companies.
The purpose of a management system is to develop a set of policies, procedures, and guidelines that ensures all the tasks of a company are carried out in accordance with the best practices. They are designed to accomplish many corporate goals such as improving efficiency in operations, financial success, client relationships as well as product quality, environmental performance, worker safety and legislative compliance.
These are often based upon the PDCA cycle, and involve creating systems that record, review and make changes to existing methods in a coordinated manner. Some of these processes are designed to meet specific standards such as ISO 9001 quality management, ISO 14001 sustainability or ISO 27001 information security.
A quality company management system must be simple to use, and accessible to all employees. This could be in the form of a light-weight application that lets anyone easily edit and publish new workflows, or quality documents, or it could simply be making a company process map accessible through an intranet. It is important to be able update the system in a way that it is in line with current business practices. This helps reduce the possibility of it becoming outdated which is a common issue with more formalized manuals and software applications that require specialist skills to maintain.