Organisations are increasingly looking for the benefits that a truly integrated management system can bring. This article explores how one company has made the journey.

Atkins Highways and Transportation (H&T), a strategic business unit within Atkins. Facing new commercial opportunities and the changing requirements of its stakeholders, H&T forged an ambitious roadmap to upgrade to ISO 9001:2000 and gain certification to ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001. These standards formed the basis of an integrated business management system (BMS) that would aim to provide real added value whilst taking into account the diverse needs of the company – and all implemented within a limited time-scale.

By the end of this article, we hope to have provided a little inspiration for those responsible for implementing their organisation’s management systems, and reveal something of the benefits of an integrated management system.

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Introduction to Atkins H&T

“Certification is a necessity in our industry – you simply wouldn’t even get to sit at the table without it. However, we wanted to do more with our systems and embarked on an ambitious programme to fully integrate the quality, safety and environmental management system elements of our business into a flexible business management system that would provide real added value while taking account of the diverse needs of those using it.”

Kevin Toogood, Head of Quality, Safety and Environment
Atkins Highways and Transportation

The UK government has committed to an unprecedented £181.9bn spend to bring the UK’s transport infrastructure up to date as part of its ten year transport plan published in 2000. Not only will this bring dividends to Britain’s hard-pressed commuters using the nation’s road and rail network, but it is good news for those organisations in the highway engineering and transportation sectors that will have the responsibility of bringing the vision to reality.

One such organisation is the Highways and Transportation (H&T) Strategic Business Unit within Atkins. A leading supplier of highways and transport services, H&T has achieved high growth rates since the mid 90’s despite the depressed state of the market at that time and is now responsible for over 25% of the UK’s trunk road and motorway network.

H&T comprises five business divisions: Transport Planning; Transport Solutions; Highway Management; Integrated Services and a central marketing unit responsible for international business. In effect, the business covers activities as diverse as cutting grass verges in Somerset and winter road maintenance to network management, from policy and planning through to traffic control and information, and from highway design to special educational needs school bus services in Surrey.

When Kevin Toogood joined H&T in March 2002 to head up the QSE team, his first task was to review the existing Q, E and S strategies and mould these into an integrated five-year rolling emergent programme of continual improvement. “Certification is only part of the picture for H&T and is simply a reflection of our business processes, our longer term aspirations are now specifically geared toward European Foundation for Quality Management Business Excellence Model and ultimately a formal submission to the award process, this can only be made possible by leading the field in our key performance indicators (KPI’s).” Kevin Toogood

To ensure the business is able to meet the changing requirements of its key stakeholders, H&T set an ambitous 15 month window in which it wanted to achieve upgrade to the new standard, ISO 9001:2000 and certification for the first time to the environmental management system (EMS) standard, ISO 14001 and the occupational health and safety (OHS) specification, OHSAS 18001. The integration of these three disciplines would form a business management system (BMS) that would also include its Investors in People accreditation; marketing and development; and financial management functions.

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First steps — turning nine into one

“We have held quality certification since 1991. Making the transition to ISO 9001:2000 for the business was really more a case of realigning some of our processes to be more focused on the outcomes rather than being procedurally based.”

Kevin Toogood

Achieving full certification to ISO 9001:2000 for the H&T business by the autumn of 2002 was the first major milestone in the QSE vision of a fully integrated business management system (BMS). However, the diverse nature of the business had meant a ‘one size fits all’ approach didn’t work and the result was that nine separate quality systems had been developed and certificated. Therefore, the first logical step was to pull the nine into a single system that would both exceed the needs of our customers, enhance service delivery while offering flexibility to the users both blue and white collars. This meant the style of the system had to be both comprehensible and effective to meet the diverse needs of the H&T business.

As with all such initiatives, it was important to recognise the systems would be at differing stages in their maturity. The key to the success would be to identify and utilise best practice from throughout the company and incorporate this within a single system.

The process started in January 2001 when Debbie Sharpe, business process manager in the QSE team - responsible for initiating and managing this project and transition to the new standard – brought together the key people or ‘champions’ responsible locally for the existing systems. Over the next six months, this cross-functional team pulled together examples of best practice from each. They also made the move from a series of procedural driven systems to a process-based approach in order to meet the requirements of ISO 9001:2000.

Simultaneously, Debbie looked at the training that was needed to maintain and develop the system, a process that was to continue beyond certification. Indeed, training and communication to all users of the system have been a vital element of the entire certification programme. Throughout 2002, Debbie and her team developed a comprehensive training programme tailored to the diverse needs of groups of users and supported by appropriate information on the intranet, literature and other working documents including flow charts. In this way, all employees, whether office or field based have received training appropriate to their roles.

“Recognising that there are two dimensions to be covered by the term ‘training’ is crucial to ensure successful certification and the development of an effective BMS. Debbie Sharpe and the QSE team quickly established the need for localised training to explain ‘why’ the systems had changed and their benefits and not just providing training on ‘how’ to use it.

“This required significant investment in terms of resources with a £1m investment during 2002 and the continued dedication of the businesses and QSE team to enhance its services to our clients. This was essential to maintain the buy-in from the business and project managers.” Kevin Toogood.

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Adding 'e' and 's' to the mix

“We have always had safety, quality and environmental management systems. The benefits of aligning our EMS and SMS to recognised standards / specifications are the drivers of audit, management review, objectives and targets and improvement activities. The objective was to provide real added value for the Safety and Environment systems.”

Kevin Toogood

By the very nature of the work, H&T has both a very high level of technical knowledge on environmental aspects and a potential impact on the environment. Application of poor processes can expose the general public to unnecessary risks and place contracts in jeopardy.

It was therefore a natural progression for the H&T board to endorse the QSE team recommendation in late 2001 for certification to the EMS standard, with ISO 14001 becoming its 2nd milestone. While H&T already had an EMS, the certification process would help formalise the system and provide the rigours of continual assessment and management review. The LRQA team initially undertook a pilot assessment in three regions – Somerset, Northampton and Bristol - before undertaking an audit across the H&T business using the multi-site sampling technique. H&T achieved certification in December 2002.

The third milestone for H&T to achieve was formal recognition of its health and safety management system to OHSAS 18001. The approach taken was to pilot two areas of the business, Highway Management and Integrated Services. This made the project a manageable exercise while at the same time validating the multi-site sampling assessment technique used by LRQA. Once the pilot was successfully completed, the remainder of H&T was assessed by sampling key locations and processes.

Full implementation of a system brought significant benefits as Kevin Toogood explains. “Traditionally, health and safety is very much a linear process, focusing on risk assessment, controls and issuing procedures, etc. OHSAS 18001 has given us the regime in which we are able to include the improvement cycle, which is crucial. By utilising existing Q and E systems to avoid non-added value repetition we have implemented OHSAS 18001 at a minimal cost and with maximum benefits. The 18001 approach has in part contributed to significant improvements in the reduction in greater than 3 day accidents of 27%, and major incidents of 62%, this we feel is partly due to the change from a linear process to a cyclical improvement loop.

This has already led to a number of new initiatives, one being the formation of an Accident Reduction Workshop within the Integrated Services (IS) business unit by Nichola Bown IS Health and Safety Manager. Analysis of the accident statistics show that the primary cause is human factor related – accidents caused by momentary lapses in concentration rather than failing to wear the right safety equipment or use the appropriate tools for a job. With this in mind, the solutions have to be more innovative and this therefore makes the challenge even harder. However, H&T commitment to H&S is uncompromising and striving for excellence and 18001 are very much seen as tools to achieve this goal.

The workshop was held in early 2002. It is the health and safety representatives from Integrated Services depots and offices around the UK who are involved with health and safety every day – and therefore the most appropriate to help identify strategies on how to minimise or eradicate types of incident.

Through the workshop, this group initiated a regular quarterly publication of a newsletter for all Integrated Services staff focusing on health and safety. A second outcome - and one that is currently being collated was to conduct a survey into how employees actually perceived the safety culture within H&T. This again provides opportunities to enhance in health and Safety in terms of communication improvement.

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Relationship with LRQA

“It has been the strategic partnership with LRQA that has allowed us to make the system changes our business needed in order to move forward. It isn’t a question of what we can sweep under the carpet but a question of talking about real issues, and real improvements. We have got to that stage because of the relationship that has been built between the assessors and our people.”

Kevin Toogood

The Group Assurance Manager of Atkins, Keith Sarney, transferred the certification business to LRQA as part of a group-wide QSE strategy in 2000. This change stemmed from a desire to use a single provider of business systems certification services across the Group and followed a sustained period of unsatisfactory service from Atkins’ principal certification body at the time. LRQA was considered to be the most professional and capable alternative in meeting Atkins’ needs.

The QSE strategy for H&T at this point was well advanced and had clearly defined strategic objectives. Timescales were tight.. The business wanted to update its quality system to the 2000 version, gain original certification to OHSAS 18001 and ISO 14001 while moving towards integrated assessments – and all within 15 months. With 27 locations and over 3,500 people working within the system, it was a challenging target for all involved.

Kevin explains. “LRQA was an unknown quantity to me. I joined the company as we were going through the transition to ISO 9001:2000 and any reservations I had were quickly put to rest. I was very impressed with the quality of the audits. Most importantly, the assessors had a pragmatic approach, focusing on the outcomes and the benefits. They did not get caught up with the technicalities and semantics of what the standard was saying while all the time ensuring we met the requirements.”

“The benefits from certification are not purely about gaining recognition to the standard, but it is a driver for improvement. Our auditors challenge what we do, help stimulate ideas – without crossing the boundaries into consultancy and that adds value to our business.”

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Integration

“The rationale behind the local and regional integrated third party QSE assessments is to minimise the impact on the business while maintaining the integrity of the process.”

Kevin Toogood

With 3,500 people, 27 locations and around the same number of depots, the assessment programme was often seen as ‘death by audit.’ Some managers underwent a quality audit shortly followed by an environmental audit and they frequently found they had to relay much of the same information. Added to this were numerous client audits and valuable time was being taken away from the core business.

LRQA took over the certification contract in 2000 and developed a sampling technique that would see the assessors visit a representative sample of depots and locations throughout the UK. This was with the proviso that should they need to, they could visit other H&T sites as required.

To ensure the process was as effective as possible, H&T in discussions with LRQA devised a strategy whereby the assessors would undertake a local and regional QSE audit. In real terms, this will see the EMS/OHS and the quality assessors going on-site as a team, meeting local managers together and getting an overview of the business ‘in one hit.’ This minimises the impact on the business while maintaining the integrity of the process.

This has involved major changes in the way that LRQA schedules the assessment team visits. This process has been facilitated by the use of an on-line planning tool, External Assessment Planner (EAP), hosted as a virtual web site on ProNet, the Atkins business collaboration software tool. Developed in-house by the Atkins Group Assurance Manager, Keith Sarney, EAP is used throughout the company and by the LRQA auditing and customer service teams to give visibility of the assessment programme and results, and enables direct communication and confirmation of planned arrangements.

Integration has been a vital component in helping drive continual improvement of the H&T QSE BMS. Regional meetings with the H&T QSE teams are now held to address common issues and the sharing of best practice. This was really only possible because the system had reached a level of integration that allowed for effective communication across H&T to take place.

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The Future

“We are constantly looking to improve our business management system, our processes, and utilise the skills the LRQA auditors bring to the table. They have different skill sets and knowledge of other businesses and sectors. Without crossing the boundaries of consultancy this can stimulate improvement ideas. We are such a diverse business, it is good to have other people looking at our system who are prepared to challenge the way we do things, whilst also recognising our business needs.”

Kevin Toogood

With certification achieved within the tight timescales originally envisioned, the challenges for Atkins H&T now lie in further enhancement of its BMS, and using this as a base to implement best practice to provide world-class performance and to achieve its target of UK National business excellence award winners to EFQM model by 2007. Receiving the commitment to excellence certificate from Excellence South West in 2002, again demonstrates H&T drive toward improvement across its business in customer focused processes.

H&T is already involved in benchmarking with some of its local authority clients and the Highways Agency who themselves are looking towards integrated management systems as the way to better manager their businesses. While this is in its early stages, this approach offers opportunities to utilise the skills and processes H&T have developed, whilst continuing to provide real value added service to customers and partners alike.

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