International Symposium on Occupational Safety and Hygiene Integrated Management Systems: On the path to maturity and efficiency assessment Domingues, Pedro a,b ; Sampaio, Paulo b ; Arezes, Pedro M. b a Lab. Químico Marques Ferreira, Rua Max Grundig, Ed. 3, Ferreiros, Braga, Portugal. Email: pedrodomin@sapo.pt b University of Minho, Production and Systems Department, Guimarães, Portugal; E-mail: paulosampaio@dps.uminho.pt and parezes@dps.uminho.pt ABSTRACT The results from an online survey focusing Portuguese integrated management system (IMS) ruled companies are presented in the present article. These are partial results from an ongoing project aiming the maturity rating and assessment of IMS and companies where implemented. Surveyed companies match partially the national Portuguese profile, namely, on geographic location and company dimension characteristics. Results suggest that motivations, benefits and obstacles related to integration are internal or mainly internal. A sequential over a step by step or “all in” integration sequence as been reported as the most common one among the surveyed companies. Integrated audits seem to be the model adopted by the majority of the companies. Systems managers found implementation sub-systems standards easy or, at least, reasonably easy, to integrate. A major dividing point between surveyed companies is related to the identification of organizational items not susceptible of being integrated. Approximately 55% of the surveyed companies identified those items while 45% did not. Systems managers’ majority did not felt that an ultimate excellence level of integration had been reached by their companies but rather a high integration level corresponding to common organizational structure plus policies and goals, management tools and documental integration. All respondents felt that the overall company performance would be lower (79%) or at least equal (21%) if running through separate management sub-systems. Almost totally agreed that IMS is an add value to the company. Related to responsibility it seem that companies option rely on traditional pyramidal model with an IMS coordinator and a QMS, an EMS and/or an OHSMS sub-systems responsible providing feedback. Finally, process, operations and management monitoring was assessed by the survey. Almost all companies agreed that monitoring wa s performed by key process indicators (KPI’s), operations process indicators (OPI’s) or management process indicators (MPI’s). Similar results were found when asked about integrated indicators. Keywords: IMS; Survey; Maturity. 1. INTRODUCTION Integrated management systems (IMS) subject had been addressed by several authors since the early nineties of the last century, mainly due to the ISO 14001 release and the potential synergies that could be developed with ISO 9001 standard (published in middle eighties). Recently, Asif et al. (2010) proposed a novel systematization scheme regarding IMS focused literature. On a national level, several papers have been published focusing IMS, namely those authored by Santos et al. (2011), Sampaio et al. (2010, 2011) and Domingues et al. (2010a,b, 2011a-e). Sampaio and Saraiva (2011) published the latest Portuguese data related to IMS (Figure 1 and 2). Those results show that the majority of the organizations with an IMS are located at the North, Centre and Lisbon regions. Regarding the IMS typology it seems possible to conclude that ISO 9001+ISO 14001 and ISO 9001+ISO 14001+OHSAS 18001/NP 4397 are the most reported options. Figure 1- IMS data per NUT II Region and Typology Figure 2- IMS typology data Maturity assessment regarding products or systems had been described in several papers and it is currently a widely accepted methodology to comparatively ascribe an evolutionary level to the focus item. Thus, maturity models enable to 224