This example is an extract from the Sustainability Report 2011 published by Neumarkter Lammsbräu

Small and medium-sized enterprises often reject the notion that management systems can serve a useful purpose in steering a company. Many of these businesses believe that management systems are nothing more than a pointless expense and accomplish little other than add layers of bureaucracy.

Any costs associated with management systems are seen either as unnecessary or – in instances where customers’ terms and conditions call for proof that a given management system is in place – as a necessary evil. Other companies, including many in the organic products sector, believe that it’s enough if the company simply lives by the philosophy at the heart of its corporate mission. Many of these businesses are thus managed more by instinct than reason. As a result, they run the risk of being fully reliant on the business aptitude and convictions of specific individuals – just one or two company leaders, perhaps.

Neumarkter Lammsbräu understands that management guides are tools that enable us to advance our company, to deliver our corporate vision, and to spread the tasks of leadership across more than one pair of shoulders. At the same time, we emphasize the importance of not subjugating ourselves to the dictates a particular management guide, choosing instead to adapt such systems to our own particular circumstances and business environment. The value of the management guides for our business lies, in part, in the fact that they enable us to concentrate better on aspects like improving our environmental performance or sharpening our customer focus.

At the same time, management systems always exert gentle pressure on the business by reminding us to deal with, and include in our decision-making, those less agreeable aspects to which we might otherwise be inclined to turn a blind eye in day-to-day operations.

For many years now, we’ve worked with the EFQM Excellence Model. This serves as a framework for our organizational management system and helps us to map and improve our entire business – from our strategy and management to our processes, our people working at Neumarkter Lammsbräu and, ultimately, the products of our work. We are careful to ensure that we take sustainability factors into account in every area of our business.

We look at ways to improve our environmental, customer, and occupational safety performance with the aid of an integrated management system comprising separate management guides that cover “classic” certifiable standards. The latter include EMAS for environmental management and DIN ISO 9001 for quality management.

We can only follow all these management guides correctly if we document and communicate the planning, targeting, implementation and evaluation of our business operations properly. Documentation serves to remind us at intervals of the decisions we have taken and allows us to reconstruct and review the initiatives that have followed in their wake. Breathing life into management guides means incorporating them thoroughly into company strategy, and the initiatives they spawn must be communicated actively within the organization.

How does this work at Neumarkter Lammsbräu? The company builds its strategies on intermediate-term and long-term strategic plans.

You can find out more in the report.

Neumarkter Lammsbräu, Sustainability Report 2011, p. 18