Leadership and the ISO Management System Standards

Environmental Management Systems - A short why, what and how ISO 14001 is the international standard for environmental management systems. The 2015 version is the latest iteration of the standard, and has been aligned with the other management systems standards for easy integration. Why must we as organizations be concerned with environmental management, and certainly it is not for the leadership of the company to worry about it? The simple answer is that the activities of our organizations impact negatively on the environment, and as business leaders we should be concerned about it. It impacts on the concept of sustainability of organizations, and particularly on environmental sustainability, which affects all of us. Environmental sustainability has been defined as: The ability to maintain rates of renewable resource harvesting, pollution creation and non-renewable resource depletion that can be continued indefinitely This definition sums up the necessity for enviro...

Waste in the workplace: Muri, Mura and Muda Today I would like to discuss something that affects most businesses, especially production facilities (although we see this in other industries as well). It is how we tend to waste without even realizing it in most cases.  I am using information and examples from a blog that posted in August, 2017, by the Lean Way Blog, published by Doanh Do. The information pertains to lean manufacturing, a way to optimize production. It was mostly developed by Toyota in Japan. There are normally three situations in the workplace that are undesirable. They are: Muda: the Japanese word for wastefulness, uselessness or futility Mura: the Japanese word for unevenness, non-uniformity or irregularity Muri: the Japanese word for over-burden, beyond one's power, execiveness, impossible or unreasonableness I would like us to look at each in a bit more detail: Muda Muda is anything that does not add value to the process. Value added wor...