Systematisation is the best way to expand your business and help to create sustainable growth. Systematising the processes of your business gives everyone a clear understanding about what they must do, allowing them the opportunity to step out of managerial and tactical posts and deliver tangible results while also being accountable. However, this requires a framework that lets you record the ‘rules’ for your company, so that routine tasks are taken off leaving time to concentrate on the tasks that matter most. This is the goal of the management system for your company.
A management system for companies aims to create a framework of policies, procedures, and guidelines to ensure that all activities of an enterprise are performed in accordance with best practice. They are designed to meet many corporate goals including improving operational efficiency and financial success, customer relationships as well as product quality, safety of workers, environmental performance and legislative compliance.
These are usually based on the PDCA cycle and involve creating procedures that document, evaluate and implement improvements to existing methods in a systematic fashion. Some of these are also designed to satisfy 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 easy to use, and accessible to all employees. This could mean in the form of a lightweight application that lets anyone easily edit and publish new workflows, or high-quality documents, or it may simply be making a company process map accessible via an intranet. It is important that you can update the system quickly to ensure that it is in line with current business practices. This minimizes the chance of it becoming obsolete which is a problem that occurs frequently with more formalized manuals or software programs which require specialist knowledge to maintain.