Quality Management System and Risk Management System: Similarities and Possibilities for Integration

Abstract

Today organizations are required to deal with and manage a variety of challenges in their day-to-day activities. Examples of these challenges are issues related to quality of products/services, environment, employees’ safety and health, corporate social responsibilities, risks and many others. In response to these challenges, several Management Systems (MSs) and Management Systems Standards (MSSs) have been introduced in recent years to systematically guide an organization to cope with these challenges. The need to create Integrated Management System (IMS) is the result of increase in the number of these MSs and MSSs. There are also evidences in literature and practice that organizations have slowly started to tackle the IMS issue. The journal papers’ related to MSs Integration field, highlight that in theory any two MSs or even more are potentially capable of being integrated. In this study, it will be shown that the attitudes and approaches behind the two important function-specific MSSs developed by ISO Organization, i.e. Quality Management System (QMS) and Risk Management System (RMS) are largely similar and complementary. Hence, the integration of these two MSs seems justifiable. The main driver for such integration is to reduce the number of MSs in an organization and hence to decrease the number of resources employed. Also it will be demonstrated that the integration of these two MSs will result in more significant background, cultural context, techniques, procedures and synergy to an organization.