THE INTEGRATED MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS: THE ROLE OF THE MAIN CONTRACTORS

misbe2011 Tracking Number 35

The authors sought to assess the effectiveness of the integration of different Management Systems (Quality Management System, Environmental Management System, Health & Safety Management System) to be installed at a number of Main Contractors and Large Clients in order to improve the Contract Management. Accordingly to results gathered by the authors, Quality Management Systems are widespread in Italy over the last decade, because of a legal compulsory requirement stemming from the Public Works Acts enforced in 1994 and in 2006. Nevertheless, in spite of such a dramatic rise in the number of Contracting Firms' certifications conforming to the ISO 9001:2008 Standard, the reliability of Quality Control-related procedures failed tremendously, while the corresponding rules have been quite often discarded in the field. Actually, only a small amount of the Large Private and Public Client Organisations awarded their own tenders to main Contractors available and wishful to comply with Quality Planning’s clauses. On the other hand, very few Italian Contractors are certified in conformity to ISO 14001:2004 Standard and even less in conformity to the recent BS OHSAS 18001:2007 Standard. Consequently, it's nor surprising that neither Clients nor Construction firms have any practical perception of the document PAS 99:2006, a BS specification aimed to bring together the shared requirements and to support the integration of Quality, Environmental and Safety requirements; Social Accountability Management requirements (with reference to SA 8000) should find also place in such a perspective, if not for ethical reasons, at least to deal with unfair competition. Whenever constrained to adhere to possible requests established by the Clients, the best effor tthat Contractors display is intended to widen the scope of the basic Quality certification, installing inside the original Quality Management System the other ones. Through this action, Contractors set up a pseudoIntegrated Management System suitable to engender a sort of added value. Finally, the paper tries to highlight some findings dealing with such an approach linked to a firm belief of the authors: the efforts made by the Client towards an effectively integrated Management system could be easily made trivial whenever the Main Contractors chose not to reflect the Management System rules in their actual behaviour. Finally, the paper tries to highlight some findings dealing with such an approach: possible efforts made by the Client could be easily made trivial whenever the Main Contractors are distinguishing the very formal rules from its own current behaviours.