What is the Annex SL System Structure?
When considering their guidelines, ISO acknowledged they expected to build up a typical, ten-rung, elevated level structure to improve comprehensibility and comprehension. “What is the Annex SL system structure?” Their completed product looks something like this:
- Scope
- Norms
- Terms and definitions
- Context of the organization
- Leadership
- Planning
- Support
- Operations
- Performance Evaluation
- Improvement
All new ISOs — including ISO 9001:2015 — are based on this structure, and there’s work completed on executing these into past and future norms. Sharing essential content, terms, and definitions will the main driving force for these principles.
Annex SL seeks to balance the need to add rules that may need to be more specific for a given area, keeping the overall structural redundancy minimum. Accordingly, its terms and definitions can add to but cannot delete or change. For example, here is a section from one draft of the ISO/IEC group working on the ISO 9001 revision.
Throughout the long-term, ISO has distributed management system guidelines for subjects going from quality and environment to data security and business congruity the executives. Despite sharing typical components, ISO management system standards all have various structures. This, thus, brings about some disarray and troubles at the execution stage.
The point of Annex SL is to upgrade the consistency and arrangement of MSS. By giving a bringing together and settled upon the elevated level structure, indistinguishable core content and basic terms and core definitions.
Organizations implement and operate several management systems they often confronted with different and sometimes contradicting requirements, terms, and definitions. Annex SL will particularly useful for organizations that choose to use a single (sometimes called integrated) management system that can simultaneously meet the requirements of two or more management system standards.
A few attempts have made since the late 90s to harmonize. The way to write these but the first group that succeeded to reach an agreement was the joint technical coordination group (JTCG) set up by ISO/ Technical management board.