The Importance of Environment and Quality Management Within a Business

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Introduction
Historically health and safety and other risk aspects such as environmental and quality management have been viewed by organizations as areas which are important in some operations within a corporation but do not directly correlate with the core activities of a business. This has always caused a downward trend when it comes to funding of management systems that enable health, safety, quality and environmental risks to be effectively be sustained.
Currently, with the rapid evolution of the industrial processes as well as the manner in which industries conduct business, there has also been a rapid evolution in the way environmental issues are tackled worldwide. The rapidly changing business world is very much due to public safety and health demands, technology, global competition, and last but not least environmental factors. It is not uncommon to find in today’s businesses, environmental aspects spearheading their marketing strategies; this mainly being as a result of customers becoming more environmentally aware which in effect causes organizations to create products with more identifiable environmentally safe attributes (Macdonald, 2002).
The benefits of the use of EHS management systems became more evident and relevant when studies of various companies who had successfully integrated these systems gained traction. In the 1950s a case study of the work which was instituted in Japan by Deming and Juran, related to statistical process control and quality management systems successfully demonstrated that the benefits of viewing such risk areas as an integral component of business were clear. Subsequent developments have led to the creation of concepts such as Total Quality Management, Six-Sigma, Kaizen and many others....

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...ions would typically produce a health and safety plan and an environmental plan and project risk assessments would tend to use different risk rating scales depending on what type of risk being assessed. Fortunately, we are now experiencing a trend for corporations to realize benefits in regarding the disciplines, even though they focus on a particular aspect of performance within a business, as being able to better function with a common management approach and building on these similarities as well as acknowledging the value in looking at them not as secondary to the actual business but as an integral part of business strategy and planning.
This paper aims to look at the benefits and challenges to integration of the individual disciplines; particularly ISO 14001 and OSHAS 18001 and the way they can effectively be built into the business strategy.

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