Certified management systems: the three key trends for 2020

As it does every fall, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has released an estimate of the number of active certificates worldwide, broken down by country and sector, distinguishing companies that have implemented management systems based on 12 major international standards. As of December 31, 2020, it is in the area of occupational health and safety (ISO 45001) that the figures stand out the most compared to a year earlier. This is also true in France. Two other trends are emerging.

The boom in occupational health and safety

He is the star of the ISO Survey 2020 This annual survey of companies that have implemented and certified their management systems shows that ISO 45001 certification, which recognizes management systems that comply with the ISO 45001 standard on occupational health and safety (OHS), was displayed by 190,429 companies worldwide as of December 31, 2020. This is five times more than a year earlier. The phenomenon can also be observed in France: 1,385 active certificates as of December 31, 2020, compared to 524 a year earlier. This threefold increase is also reflected in the number of sites covered by a certificate (a certificate can cover several sites of the same company): 5,034 at the end of 2020 compared to 1,523 at the end of 2019.

The explanation is simple: introduced only in 2018, the ISO 45001 standard is now spreading throughout the economic fabric, and companies are beginning to adopt it on a massive scale, replacing the occupational health and safety standard that had been the authority until then: OHSAS 18001. "To date, 85% of French companies that we had certified to OHSAS 18001, mainly in construction and industry, have switched to ISO 45001. We had roughly the same percentage a few weeks before the deadline for the transition to the 2015 versions of the ISO 9001 quality and 14001 environmental standards," said Béatrice Poirier, AFAQ ISO 45001 product manager at AFNOR Certification, on September 30, 2021, the day on which the last OHSAS 18001 certificates lost their validity.

In 2020, the topic of occupational health and safety was also influenced by COVID-19: between lockdowns, protective measures, and the psychological damage caused by remote working, health has taken center stage in the world of work, forcing companies to consider it from a more global perspective than just accident statistics and musculoskeletal disorders, which are well known in the industrial world. It is worth noting that ISO 22301 certification, covering business continuity management, has not followed the same path as ISO 45001, even though 2020 was a year of unprecedented disruption and showed that organizing to deal with it was a matter of survival. Finally, the appetite for workplace safety extends to cybersecurity: ISO/IEC 27001 certifications for information security management are up 11% in France and 22% worldwide.

Quality segmentation

The second major trend in this 2020 ISO Survey is that the race for quality is no longer measured solely by the number of ISO 9001 certificates and the number of sites covered, but must also be understood by looking at figures specific to other standards: ISO 22000 (food safety) , ISO 13485 (medical devices) , ISO/IEC 20000-1 (IT services) , but also other standards distinct from the ISO family (and therefore not covered by the study) such as IATF 16949 in the automotive industry , EN 9100 in aerospace or IRIS TS/22163 in the railway sector .

In France, the number of active ISO 13485 certificates as of December 31, 2020, grew by 19%. This growth is also seen globally (more than 25,000 certificates covering more than 35,000 sites) and can be explained by a favorable regulatory environment: the entry into force of European Regulation EU 2017/745 on medical devices on May 26, 2021. Boosted by a standard revised two years earlier, ISO 22000 has also been a great success, with 804 active certificates, 300 more than a year earlier. Still in France, the Qualiopi state standard offered to continuing education organizations (which must be certified before January 2022 in order to remain in the regulated market with joint funding) has thus resulted in several thousand certificates, while overall, the number of ISO 9001 certificates has stagnated. In this case, France remains in 8th place in a global ranking led by China.

One certificate for multiple sites

ISO 14001The third major trend in this 2020 ISO Survey is rationalization. One certificate now covers more and more sites. This is illustrated by the ISO 14001 standard in France, which has not resulted in more certifications than in 2019 (only 56 more), but in certifications covering three times as many sites (1 certification for 3 sites in 2019, 1 for 9 in 2020). "Large groups that once opted for site-by-site certification are now consolidating their certificates and optimizing their audits," says Vincent Gillet, Deputy Secretary General of AFNOR. Integrated management systems have been promoted for many years. This has the effect of grouping several themes (quality, safety, environment, grouped together as QSE) under a single certification process, but also of integrating the different QMSs that may exist within the same group."

However, this trend must be qualified by the impact of COVID-19: if in 2020, not all certifications repeated their growth from the previous year, it is also because, quite simply, companies that wanted to apply for certification (either for an initial audit or renewal) did not do so due to health measures that limited the ability of auditors to visit sites. This was despite the measures taken by certification bodies to offer remote options.