An empirical study on the integration of management system audits

The objective of this paper is to analyze how internal and external audits of standardized management systems are conducted, with specific focus on the actual integration of audits performed against different management system standards. The research is based on a survey of 435 organizations registered to, at a minimum, both the ISO 9001: 2000 and ISO 14001: 2004 standards. A multivariate cluster analysis is applied in order to obtain distinctive typologies of the organizations participating in the study. The results show that the majority of organizations registered to multiple standards integrate their internal audits and are also externally audited in a similar manner. In addition, three distinct groups of organizations are detected, characterized and compared with respect to their audit conduct and integration.