A Study on the Implementation of an Integrated Management System

I work as the food technologist in a British company.

My team is composed of three technical assistants, me and a technical supervisor. The team is composed of new and inexperienced individuals. I joined the company in September and the technical assistants all have been working for less than one year. The technicians had little to no experience in the industry whilst the technical supervisor has been working for that company for three years. Despite having worked for the three years, the supervisor had no experience in the food manufactory outside this business. The company is a family business, therefore it doesn’t have many prestigious customers (Frese & Keith 2015, p. 654).

The main challenges for the technical team

other than the day to day tasks are the BRC (British Retail Consortium) and the BMPA (British Meat Processors Administration) external audits. In preparation for the annual BMPA audit, the technical team was in charge of performing the internal audits following the BMPA scheme modules. The way this task was managed and delegated was not ideal in my opinion. The technical supervisor decided to separate the sections of both pork and ham modules among the three technical assistants (Davis, Lockwood, Alcott & Pantelidis 2018, p. 45). None of the technical assistants had done internal audits before. The technical supervisor, however, did very little explanation on how to perform the task suggesting looking at the previous internal audits done in the past if in need of help (Frese & Keith 2015, p. 654). The reason for the supervisor’s actions is that the company at the same time was undergoing a series of big changes like the implementation of an integrated management system throughout the business and the technical supervisor was focusing on that (Davis et al. 2018, p. 45). At the time of the audit, one of the non-conformances raised was related to the internal audits, specifically the fact that there was no objective evidence stated in the document. The technical team was then reprimanded for not doing the job correctly.

Section Two

The Integrated management systems always do not recognize the failures of the pre-developed management models (Robson 2015, p. 89). The suitability of the pre-configured solutions has been affected fact that different companies work under different integral systems. The specifications that a company would need in a data integration system would mean there would be some changes that would be applied in the scheme (Robson 2015, p. 89).

An integrated Management system suffers from a lack of a wide managerial involvement. The managerial teams are supposed to be well informed in the data integration project as it will affect the organization as a whole. The management should it fail to be involved in the data integration project would be more susceptible to making executive decisions based on unreal data (Mitreva et al. 2015, 76).

The struggle to access the integrated data is another shortcoming of the integrated management system. Some individuals in a company may deny people from other departments’ data on the grounds that they feel that the data belongs to them (Mitreva et al. 2015, 76). The top management has to intervene in this case to make sure all the departments receive the integrated data (McMeekin et al. 2006, p. 43).

The other cause for the failure of the integrated management system is due to the lack of quality data from the scheme. The quality of the data generated in a company is very important since the managerial decisions are based on the same (Vázquez & Rodríguez 2013, p. 112). Bad quality data would lead to the making of awful decisions by the management. The supply of bad data would cause a lack of trust by the company’s workers towards the data.

The integrated management system doesn’t offer support for real-time data (Yiannas 2008, p. 89). The multiple processors in the data grids can run and process information at faster rates than before. One is not required to wait for the data from one system to enable him or her move to the next scheme (Vázquez & Rodríguez 2013, p. 112). The fastness of the system is accounted to the ability of the data processors to run in parallel manners.

An integrated management system lacks the naming mechanisms that would perform the naming of data points. Similar apparatus might have multiple naming due to lack of naming mechanisms (Mitreva et al. 2015, p. 76). To ensure that the system works without hitches, there should be a technician in place who would develop a naming mechanism that would be applied in the apparatus that exist.

Section Three

I would have advised the technical team to be selective in their data collection. Not all points of the data from the system are to be acquired and used in the audit. Addition of the unwanted data in the audit process would skew the data in a certain undesired direction. The skewed data would then give unreal results. The technical team should have focused only on the significant type data points. The data points should support the major pointers of the business performance. The importance of obtaining selected data is that the system would take up all the information which others would not be considered useful for the audit process. If the manager had asked the technical team to work on the internal audit based on some selected data, there would not have been the presence of non-conformances in the review.

References

Davis, B., Lockwood, A., Alcott, P. and Pantelidis, I.S., 2018. Food and beverage management. Routledge.

Frese, M. and Keith, N., 2015. Action errors, error management, and learning in organizations. Annual review of psychology, 66, pp.661-687.

McMeekin, T.A., Baranyi, J., Bowman, J., Dalgaard, P., Kirk, M., Ross, T., Schmid, S. and Zwietering, M.H., 2006. Information systems in food safety management. International journal of food microbiology, 112(3), pp.181-194.

Mitreva, E., Taskov, N., Sazdova, J., Gjeorgieva, I. and Gjorshevski, H., 2015. The Need for Implementation of Integrated Management Systems (IMS) in Macedonian Companies. Calitatea-access la success (Quality-Access to Success), 16(147), pp.62-65.

Robson, W., 2015. Strategic management and information systems. Pearson Higher Ed.

Vázquez, E.V. and Rodríguez, E.S., 2013. Implementation of integrated management systems. Tourism & Management Studies, pp.1112-1121.

Yiannas, F., 2008. Food safety culture: Creating a behavior-based food safety management system. Springer Science & Business Media.