Historic development of Standards
In the 1960’s and ’70 quality standards were first developed as military standards, which ultimately led to the widely adopted quality standard published by the International Standardization Organization (ISO) in 1987 with ISO9000:1987 as its first version (The British Assessment Bureau 2015). In the early 2000’s, the environmental standard ISO 14001 started to gain the interest form many thousands of businesses (ISO 2013), followed by standards for Health & Safety with OHSAS 18001 reaching over 90.000 certified companies in 2011 (T.R. Fisher 2015). The standards for Quality, Environment and Health & Safety are Management System Standards (MSS). Given the ongoing growth of MSS, more and more business owners understand the importance of Quality, Health, Safety and Environmental (QHSE) aspects in the establishment of sustainable business (figure 1) and many clients and local governments require the formalization of the integration of MSS in the organization with the certification of the management systems (interviews with QHSE-managers).
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