The most effective way to expand your business and sustain growth is through systems. Systematising your company’s processes gives everyone clarity about what they’re supposed to be doing, allowing them to step out of management and tactical positions and deliver tangible results while also requiring them to be accountable. This requires a structure that lets you document the rules for your company, ensuring that routine tasks take care of themselves which allows you to focus on the tasks that matter most. This is the purpose of the management system for your company.
The purpose of a management system is to create an array of policies, procedures, and guidelines that will ensure that all tasks of a company are carried out in accordance with best practice. These systems are designed to meet different corporate goals, which include increasing efficiency in operations and financial performance. They also seek to improve customer relations and product quality, worker safety and environmental performance.
They are usually constructed around the PDCA cycle and involve the creation of procedures that document, evaluate and implement improvements to existing methods in a systematic fashion. Some of these are designed to satisfy the requirements of a specific standard such as ISO 9001 for quality management, ISO 14001 for sustainability or ISO 27001 for information security.
A good management system for a company should be simple to use and accessible to employees across the company. This could be in the form of a light weight application that lets anyone easily edit and publish new workflows or high-quality documents, or it could simply be a simple matter of making a business process map accessible via an intranet. Whatever method is chosen it is crucial that the system is easily updated so that it is always updated to reflect the current working practices of the business. This will reduce the risk of it becoming outdated which is a common issue with more formalised manuals or software applications which require specialist knowledge to maintain.