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A process-based Environmental Management System helps businesses streamline their environmental work. This is done by creating order in processes, activities, and documents. An Environmental Management System can be used independently or integrated with other management systems, for example, a Quality Management System.
An Environmental Management System supports businesses to encourage systematic environmental work. It often stems from an environmental policy and helps with planning, execution, follow-up, and improvement of the business. Using the Environmental Management System, we can show the surrounding world that we conduct systematic work to decrease our negative impact on the environment. In the processes, we make our collective responsibility visible for a more sustainable future. Besides only showing our contribution in the processes, we also reduce the use of our resources and costs for example waste disposal.
A great advantage of a management system based on ISO-standards is that they are also based on the same requirement structure. This means you can seamlessly integrate a Quality Management System (eg ISO 9001) with an Environmental Management System (eg ISO 14001). By doing this, you will have an integrated management system that you can further build upon.
Evelina Hessling, a consultant at 2c8, describes how customers more often take into account the requirements of ISO 14001 in their existing Quality Management System:
– Since you already have a Quality Management System in place, it means that most of the processes are already mapped. This way, it is much easier to start an environmental investigation where you further optimize the processes but from the environmental requirements, says Evelina.
In a Quality Management System, we start looking at the interested parties and their needs to develop and deliver our products and services with the best possible quality. In the Environmental Management System, we change or add the perspective environment. Doing this, we need to take into account the actors who set the requirements we need to meet to ensure a decreased environmental impact from our organization. Because of this, it is important to identify the relevant interested parties early on, in order to investigate what requirements are put upon us. This can be seen as the foundation of the rest of our Environmental Management System.
Since our processes make out a big part of our business, process mapping is important for the environmental work. This is why we should focus on identifying possibilities and risks surrounding the environment in our processes, and also ensure we meet the requirements set in every process. This way, we do not only develop the processes in a current state but also in a further perspective. In 2c8 Apps, you map your business and create prerequisites for effective and continuous work with identifying and complying with environmental requirements. With the help of documents such as checklists and templates connected to relevant processes and activities, things become a lot easier. With a visual management system, we can ensure that work tasks are performed in accordance with the applied regulations. In the continuous work with a management system in 2c8 Apps, the identification of discrepancies and areas of improvements is done more efficiently.