Part of Your Operation

Many facilities have multiple operating units at one location. It is not uncommon to have aresearch and development office at a production facility. The production facility may want toachieve ISO 14001 conformance, but not the R&D offices. As long as an auditor can clearlysee the separation of these two activities, both physically and administratively, there shouldbe little cause for concern.The example above can be used to illustrate another point. If a large manufacturing facilityhad an R&D office on-site, there might be two distinct functional units that share physicalresources but are separate cost centers. In some cases, units will actually pay each other foroffice space, utilities and janitorial service although they are part of the same corporation. Inthis case, separation for purposes of ISO 14001 program development and implementation isnot difficult. Activities should be separate enough, however, to be clear to an outsider. If R&Dengineers are constantly venturing out onto the production line and making changes inpractices and procedures, it may appear to an auditor that they are a portion of theoperational group for the facility. Separation of functional groups might be harder to argue.An example of separation that may NOT be acceptable is separation of the purchasingfunction from the rest of an operation. Since purchasing is tied at almost every managementlevel in an operation, this would seem unreasonable to most auditors, and could generate aconcern in evaluating an ISO 14001 EMS program.