Implementing and certifying ISO 14001 in Portugal: motives, difficulties and benefits after ISO 9001 certification

Examining the link between integrated management systems and firm performance: do the integration strategies matter?

Purpose

This study attempts to examine the performance differences between firms with and without integrated management systems (IMSs), and the impact of three integration strategies (i.e. implementing quality management system (QMS) first, then environmental management system (EMS) (QMS + EMS); implementing EMS first, then QMS (EMS + QMS); implementing QMS and EMS simultaneously (QMS − EMS)) on firm performance to reveal the IMS–performance relationship and provide empirical evidence.

Design/methodology/approach

Two panel datasets were collected during 2009–2019. This study used the Mann–Whitney non-parametric test and a sample of 33,155 observations from 4,316 Chinese listed firms to compare the performance differences between the IMS and non-IMS groups through performance indicators. This study also examined the effects of three integration strategies on firm performance using a cross-sectional time-series feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) regression model and a sample of 11,289 observations from 2,037 firms.

Findings

The results show that significant performance differences exist between IMS and non-IMS firms; however, the performance of firms with an IMS is not always better than that of firms without IMS. Furthermore, the simultaneous integration strategy has a positive impact, whereas sequential integration strategies (QMS + EMS and EMS + QMS) negatively affect firm performance. Compared with the EMS + QMS strategies, the QMS + EMS strategies have a more prominent effect on firm performance. Simultaneous strategies are more effective than sequential strategies.

Practical implications

Firms should fully consider the potential benefits and costs associated with the difficulties of IMS implementation and the implementation order of different management systems and the potential effects of the management systems in different conditions. Firms also should try to develop internal capabilities through implementing different integration strategies.

Originality/value

By comparing performance differences between firms with and without IMS, this study enriches the understanding of the performance benefits of IMS implementation in the Chinese context. By examining the impact of integration strategies that follow different sequences on firm performance, this study promotes an in-depth understanding of the integration strategies and their performance implications beyond simple descriptions and also provides new insights into operations strategy models.

Examining the role of soft dimensions on the implementation of ISO 14000 environmental management systems: a graph-theoretic approach

Organizations worldwide are now embracing different standards while approaching environmental management systems (EMS) to be environmentally and economically sustainable. The ISO 14001 EMS has captured much attention by offering efficient environmental practices organization-wide and throughout the supply chain. Human factors (HFs) are crucial behind implementing ISO 14001 EMS since research articles about ISO 14001 strongly emphasize different HFs. This study proposes a framework that solely focuses on those HFs. Influential HFs are extracted through content analysis of related literature and categorized into 5 main HFs. Opinions from experts in the relevant field about interrelationships and inheritances of the HFs are collected and converted into quantitative data. Incorporating the graph theoretic and matrix approach (GTMA), the data delivered permanent values corresponding to the main HFs and their best and worst possible values. Among the main HFs, EMS Training has been found to have the most scopes for improvement, followed by Employee Empowerment and EMS Teamwork. This study demonstrates a framework about how to assess the role of HFs behind internalizing ISO 14001 EMS and enables organizations to go for competitive benchmarking and to define and adjust goals for environmental management.

Implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility Environmental Actions in Comparison of Small, Medium, and Large Enterprises in the Slovak Republic

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been a highly debated topic in recent years. The aim of this approach is to achieve sustainability through three basic pillars: the economic, social, and environmental. Today, corporate environmental responsibility is coming to the fore with the aim of solving global and regional environmental issues. An important aspect of the study was to identify the influence of the size of a company on the involvement in CSR. The results of the study suggest the potential impact of the legislative obligation to disclose non-financial information (CSR activities) on involvement in CSR, where only large companies have this obligation. No study has been conducted in the Slovak Republic on the impact of the size parameter of a company on CSR activities in the environmental area comparing small, medium, and large enterprises. The findings also indicate differences between the approach companies take to global and regional environmental issues, showing that companies are more involved with regional environmental issues. This paper adds to the literature on the issues of sustainability, corporate social behaviors, and the environmental access of companies of different sizes. The research showed the highest involvement in CSR activities in the field of ecology in large companies, which creates the need for further research with regard to possible legislative changes, with the possibility of extending the mandatory reports of CSR activities to small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Lessons learned from quality management system ISO 9001:2015 certification: practices and barrier identification from Brazilian industrial companies

Purpose

This study used a qualitative approach on five case studies in Brazilian industrial companies. The research used interviews, document analysis and on-site visits to collect and analyze data. The companies were selected based on the following criteria: operating in the industrial sector, updating their quality management system (QMS) process to ISO 9001: 2015 and agreeing to participate in this study.

Design/methodology/approach

This article aims to investigate the strategies of industrial companies adopted for ISO-9001:2015 certification in light of the six major advances concerning the previous version. Thus, QMS of other organizations can incorporate identified lessons learned, whether certified or not.

Findings

The main finding of the research is the systematization of a set of lessons learned in the experiences of implementing the six significant advances of ISO 9001 concerning the previous version by industrial companies in the State of São Paulo in Brazil. These lessons can and should be used by other organizations to improve their QMSs.

Practical implications

The practices identified in this empirical research can serve as benchmarking to assist quality managers from other companies in QMS certification based on ISO 9001: 2015 or even those not certified but interested in updating their QMSs. Therefore, lessons learned can significantly minimize efforts to improve your projects, processes, products and services. These findings can also help industrial companies improve their production efficiency and effectiveness through quality improvement.

Originality/value

The main novelty of the research is the consolidation of theoretical and practical analysis of the main changes in the latest version of the ISO 9001 standards. The efforts to fulfill those changes result in lessons learned. The “lessons learned” will form a new block of knowledge that will subsidize theoretical (new research) and practical (formulation of a new ISO 9001 standard and helps quality managers improve their systems).

An evaluation of documentation requirements for ISO 9001 compliance in scrum projects

Purpose

Quality management standards (e.g. ISO 9001) lead to process conformance in the realization of quality goods and services; however, they can be rather document intensive. This paper investigates documentation practices used for aligning “light-weight” Scrum methods with ISO 9001 in a leading healthcare software firm.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors investigated how “light-weight” Scrum approaches fit with organizational documentation practices for ISO 9001 compliance in one leading healthcare software development firm. Three investigative rounds were conducted with software professionals having different Scrum roles to understand their challenges in maintaining process documentation with Scrum methods.

Findings

ISO standards stipulate certain mandatory documentation as evidence that certain pre-defined processes are followed in the build-up of quality goods and services. However, this may result in “heavy-weight” document driven approaches that interfere with “light-weight” Scrum methods. Case study findings reveal tensions faced by software professionals in maintaining the ISO 9001 documentation. That is, while some level of documentation is considered useful, software professionals consider certain other documentation tasks to be excessive and cumbersome. Further, many operational documents were written retrospectively for administrative compliance, leading to reduced, incomplete and ambiguous descriptions.

Practical implications

The study provides much value for practitioners in adapting their documentation with ongoing operational processes. Further, the critique on current ISO 9001 implementations in Agile environments has implications for future documentation practice.

Originality/value

The empirically drawn findings showcase some of the challenges in maintaining ISO 9001 documentation within Scrum projects. The study has contributed to both theory and practice in relation to the co-existence of ISO drawn standards with Agile approaches used for software development.

The Influence of ISO 9001 & ISO 14001 on Sustainable Supply Chain Management in the Textile Industry

The examination of implementing ISO standards can provide new insight as to their quality and environmental management benefits. These insights can be more impactful in manufacturing sectors and especially textiles as this sector is known for its environmental degradation and questionable supply chain practices. This exploratory study investigates the extent to which organizations that implement either ISO 9001 or 14001 standards impact sustainable supply chain management (SSCM). We also investigate the extent to which these two standards improve SSCM for the textile industry within a block of European countries consisting of Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. In this empirical study, we use several measures to help identify the extent of impacts of examined standardized management systems on improvements in different processes of SSCM. Our contributions to the field include finding that quality management systems support environmental processes, relationships with stakeholders, processes within the supply chain, and SSCM. Other findings include implementing environmental management system standards impact the rationalization of other processes. Finally, we find more significant supply chain impacts with the implementation of both standards than by either standard alone. The study concludes with suggestions for extension of this study and opportunities for further research.

Motives, Barriers, and Expected Benefits of ISO 14001 in the Agri-Food Sector

Over time, sustainability has gained a greater presence in companies and with consumers around the world, although it can be said that there is still some confusion in its conceptualization and in the identification of the driving factors. A part of the literature considers that environmental management systems (EMS) such as ISO 14001 are facilitating factors that allow organizational remodeling towards more sustainable production. For a better understanding, this paper presents a qualitative study with semi-structured interviews to analyze the perceptions that managers, employees, and quality managers have about the concept of sustainability and, given that environmental management systems are considered as motivational factors, it also analyzes the perceptions they have about the motivations, barriers, and expected benefits of their adoption in the olive food industry in southern Spain. It is possible to point out the existence of some confusion about the concept of sustainability, and that both regulatory and market factors such as image and reputation improvement, differentiation, and sales increases, especially in exports, are considered to be motivational for their implementation. This work contributes to the literature on sustainability and environmental management systems in sectors of activity with high environmental involvement, such as the agri-food industry.

Becoming Carbon Neutral in Costa Rica to Be More Sustainable: An AHP Approach

We propose addressing an organization’s adoption of an environmental certification as a multicriteria problem considering environmental sustainability as well as economic and strategic aspects. Our methodological approach uses the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), which we use in an empirical application to analyze the adoption decision of several Costa Rican firms and institutions. Firstly, we select a set of economic, strategic, and environmental criteria that seem relevant for the organization’s direction. We select these criteria according to our literature review and a series of face-to-face interviews with scholars and companies’ managers. As an environmental certification, we focus on Carbon Neutral (CN), which is a domestic certification aimed at reducing or offsetting carbon emissions. For the sake of comparison, we also consider ISO 14001, which is a well-known international standard aimed at compliance with environmental norms. We conduct the AHP analysis using the answers given by 24 companies and institutions, which in aggregate terms, give CN a higher score than ISO 14001. This result is mainly due to the fact that CN ranks above ISO 14001 when attending to environmental sustainability, although ISO 14001 tends to be preferred in economic and strategic terms.

Factors for improving performance in ISO 9001 certified small- and medium-sized service enterprises

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that are important for improving the performance of ISO 9001 certified small- and medium-sized service enterprises (SMSEs).

Design/methodology/approach

Preliminary research questions were set on the basis of a literature review and then submitted to a Delphi panel of experts. The results from the Delphi panel were transformed into hypotheses in the form of a survey. A sample comprising 115 Italian SMSEs answered the survey, which also included specific fields for qualitative notes. The hypothesis tests used 95% confidence intervals, and notes and suggestions from the respondents were also collected.

Findings

The findings relate to the role and responsibilities of the quality manager, as well the entrepreneur and partners, the quality of the enterprise culture, training, awareness concerning process key performance indicators, visual management and modern digitised documentation and communication. Furthermore, criticisms emerged regarding the ISO 9001 standard in terms of cost of quality measurement, day-to-day improvement and problem-solving.

Research limitations/implications

This research is limited to SMSEs. The limitations of this research open avenues for further research. In particular, many suggestions from the respondents seem generalisable to other industries and also to large manufacturing firms.

Practical implications

The findings of this research could be used as a guideline for implementing ISO 9001 in the SMSE sector. Moreover, some of the criticisms could be taken into account for the next revision of the ISO 9001 standard.

Originality/value

This is one of the first papers to discuss important factors for improving the performance of ISO 9001 in the SMSE sector.

Sustainability and Quality Management in the Italian Luxury Furniture Sector: A Circular Economy Perspective

The growing attention paid to global environmental risks has gradually raised interest, both on the agendas of firms and governments towards the development of new business models such as Circular Economy. This study is focused on the luxury furniture industry and it is aimed at investigating how much furniture companies know about Circular Economy practices, what they specifically do for implementing them and what factors motivate, support or hinder their adoption. The role of product and process certifications in developing such sustainable practices is also analyzed, given their importance for implementing environmentally sustainable practices. The research method is based on a qualitative multiple case study carried out on four Italian companies operating in the luxury furniture industry. A worthy degree of awareness and knowledge of Circular Economy principles emerged from the analysis. Nevertheless, furniture companies analyzed are still little involved in Circular Economy practices, especially concerning reuse and recycle actions, which are particularly important within this perspective. Similarly, very little use of process and product certifications emerged from the study. Therefore, a potential gap seems to arise between the positive attitude towards Circular Economy practices and their actual implementation, which suggests useful implications for both institutions and managers involved in sustainable development processes.

The Impact of International Management Standards on Academic Research

Management standards serve as an effective knowledge diffusion channel, considering that they offer comprehensive scientific and practical knowledge for many different stakeholders. This research aims to study the potential of management standards to diffuse knowledge, especially within the scientific community. Therefore, it analyzes the relationship between management standards and the academic literature. It focuses on international management standards, namely ISO 14001 and ISO 9001 and their ‘European counterparts’ EMAS and the EFQM Excellence model. We tested whether scientific publications, which address these international and European management standards, are more likely to lead to follow-up research than comparable scientific publications measured by the impact on average forward citations. Hence, we applied a negative binominal regression model on bibliometric data. Findings show that publications addressing ISO 14001 alone or in combination with other standards lead to higher average forward citations than the comparison group. In conclusion, international management standards foster the academic research progress of the topics addressed by the respective standard. Our research implies the importance of monitoring standards for the scientific community and suggests Standard Setting Organizations to foster actively the research progress.

Empirical evidence about ISO 9001 and ISO 9004 in Italian companies

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the experience of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001 certified companies, examining their motivations to introduce the standard and their perceived benefits and barriers. In parallel, the research investigated the knowledge and perception of ISO 9004 guideline, analyzing if it could give an added value to certified companies.

Design/methodology/approach

A questionnaire was proposed by e-mail to 2,581 Italian ISO 9001 certified companies from January 18 to March 31, 2016; 522 companies participated to the survey.

Findings

Companies of different size have been driven by different motivations to certification, reaching different types of benefits, while both large and small ones perceived the greater bureaucratization as an obstacle. The ISO 9004 standard is little known and applied among Italian companies, but the ones which adopted it benefited from it.

Research limitations/implications

A limitation may be derived from the fact that the sample was composed only of Italian companies, although this effect was to understand perceptions and trends of these international standards in the Italian reality.

Practical implications

Analyzing perceived advantages and disadvantages of ISO 9001 and 9004 could be crucial for managers to understand if their joint use is the right strategy to gain competitiveness in the reference markets.

Originality/value

Compared to previous studies in which ISO 9001 was evaluated as a stand-alone standard, the research made a comparative evaluation with ISO 9004, as ISO considers them to be “consistent pair of standards,” covering the literature gap about the effectiveness of the joint use of them.