A2.3.1 Performance Improvement
Performance improvement can occur at different levels:
- an individual
- a department or team
- an organizational unit
- the organization itself
To reach its potential, your organization must continuously improve its performance. This will be in a number of areas, for example:
- Finance
- Generating revenue.
- Increasing profits.
- Maintaining cash flow.
- Customers
- Developing and maintaining profitable customer relationships.
- Understand and anticipate customer needs.
- Improve customer service management.
- Improve marketing and sales performance.
- Supply Chain
- Review, improve and assess risk of procurement functions to realize long-term, sustainable benefits
- Improve supply chains and infrastructure in emerging markets (as a catalyst to secure new market share and drive revenue growth).
- Integrate environmental, sustainable and low carbon aspects into end-to-end supply chains.
- People and organizational change
- IT systems
- Strategic direction
Environmental performance improvement is simply using that concept to improve the environmental performance of an activity, process or procedure.
Continual Improvement is the underpinning concept of formal management systems such as ISO 14001 (the Environmental Management Standard) and ISO 9001 (the Quality Management Standard). Continual Improvement is simply a never-ending cycle of performance improvement.
An Environmental Management System (EMS) is a very useful tool in terms of environmental performance management; one that will help you identify ways to improve environmental performance and then develop and implement a programme to improve environmental performance. EMS is covered in Unit C2 EMS.
To demonstrate improvement, you need to know the current performance: the starting point. This is discussed in Unit C3 Monitoring.
It is also helpful to know where your competitors stand. Benchmarking is a useful tool, which is discussed in Unit C10.