Objective Measurement of the Extent of Conformity to Management System Standards

The approach described in this paper relies on a radical and innovative approach to enable a management system to demonstrate conformity to the requirements of an unlimited number of management system standard requirements, at the cost of performing a single mapping exercise. This unique approach relies on interposing a 'process reference model' between the process evidence of the enterprise management system and the normative requirements of various management systems standards of interest. This approach requires that the process evidence of the enterprise management system is mapped to the process reference model elements - a once-off exercise. The mapping of the process reference model elements to the various management system requirements is also performed as a 'once off exercise, and is completely independent of the enterprise management system. By quantifying the judgements made when creating these various links, and by appropriately aggregating the data to derive quantitative results for the extent of the coverage of process reference model (by the management system process evidence) we can derive the extent of the coverage of the requirements of the various management system standards of interest. This leads to a novel result that the question 'how much ISO 9001 have you got?' can be expressed in meaningful, quantifiable and accurate terms, based on objective evidence.