Comprehensive management systems such as ISO 9001 or ISO 14001 are designed to help organizations improve processes, ensure customer satisfaction, efficient information flow, efficient use of resources and many other prosperous management areas. These systems can also bring unintended direct and indirect effects on organizations. In this study, the authors examine the environmental effects that the implementation of these management systems cause.
A survey-based methodology was used for this study, with textile organizations in three countries – Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The research focused on four areas related to environmental effects. The first area was the level of improvement of the organizations' environmental performance, which was examined by the methods of descriptive statistics. The second area was analyzing differences in environmental effects concerning the implementation of the systems using inferential statistics. The third area was the analysis of latent links between individual effects using factor analysis.
This study's insights shed some light on the benefits of implementing more, not fewer systems with benefits to organizations and entire industries with new possibilities for economic growth that do not have to come at the expense of the environment.
Organizations implementing management systems can realize dynamic benefits across a supply chain and within a manufacturing organization. Here the authors see an opportunity for ISO systems as a stepping stone to a more sustainable textile manufacturing economy.
