Management Review is another major tool in the improvement arsenal. As the MD/Owner you should lead this review of what your organisation came up with in the Plan phase of developing your system and indeed how it performed in the Do phase. Incidentally, Management Review is a must-do not only for the effectiveness of your whole system but also to retain your certification, it simply cannot be omitted in any twelve month period and I would suggest you do it at least every six months to get better and better at it. Often Management Review is the first place an auditor will start at during audits subsequent to your successful certification. Your Management Review minutes will give him all sorts of audit trails.
It is good practice to strictly follow a comprehensive agenda for your Reviews. Are your policies still appropriate? Have the various elements of your integrated management system performed adequately – quality management, environmental management, health and safety management? What changes have occurred that could affect your system – new customers, new products, new personnel, new legislation, new environmental aspects, and new health and safety risks? Your system has to keep pace with your evolving company and Management Review is the main mechanism for doing so. You will look at the results of your internal audits. What did you find? What were the answers to those questions that hurt? How did your corrective action procedures perform? You will assess the contribution of your key suppliers and subcontractors and determine if their performance has been good enough for you; they are often pivotal to your delivered product and they have to be assessed and they have to develop with you. You will look at the attainment so far of the improvement Objectives that came out of the Plan phase. Are they still relevant? Have any been achieved? Have any fallen behind? Some may have been rendered obsolete by events. Are new Objectives required? Crucially, are customers getting satisfaction? Do they want more from us; can we give them more? What lessons have we learned? Can those lessons be applied to different areas of the business from which they were gleaned, thereby providing another example of preventive action in action. Clearly, Management Review represents so many opportunities for improvement. In fact ISO expects you to generate recommendations for improvement that you will take from your meeting and put them into place.
At the very least you will come out of Management Review with a revamped and updated set of Objectives, with their programmes and allocated responsibility.
