Integrated Management System Build

A fixed-scope, fixed-fee project that builds ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 as one management system and takes you through to certification. Twelve to twenty weeks. £10,000 to £30,000 depending on size and how many standards are in scope.

Not three consultants, three manuals and three audits. One system, one project, one person running it.

One system, not three

Since the standards moved to a common structure, most of what they ask for is the same question asked three times. Context of the organisation. Leadership. Risk and opportunity. Competence. Documented information. Internal audit. Management review. Improvement.

Build them separately and you write all of that three times over, maintain three sets of records, run three internal audit programmes and host three certification visits a year. Build them together and you define it once.

The parts that genuinely differ stay separate, because they should: environmental aspects and impacts, hazard identification and risk assessment, customer requirements and product conformity. Everything else runs as one.

If you are still deciding whether integration is right, the background on how and why it works covers that. This page is about the build itself.

What's included

Gap analysis. Two to three days on site against every standard in scope. You get a written report and a fixed quote for the rest before committing to the build.
Scope, context and interested parties, defined in your language rather than lifted from a template.
Process map. How the business actually runs, drawn with your managers rather than at them.
Risk and opportunity register covering quality, environmental and OH&S risk in one place, built from the risk assessments you already run rather than beside them.
Aspects and impacts register for 14001, scored honestly against your real processes.
Hazard identification and risk assessment for 45001, built on your existing assessments.
Legal and compliance register across all three disciplines, current at handover.
Documented information. The minimum the standards require that also works in practice: procedures people follow, forms they will actually fill in, records that prove what needs proving.
Objectives and KPIs tied to numbers your board already looks at.
Internal audit programme designed, scheduled, and the first full cycle run alongside you.
Internal auditor training for two to four of your people, so the programme survives without us.
Management review. The first one facilitated, with an agenda you can reuse.
Certification body support. Help choosing a UKAS-accredited body, quote comparison, and we are on site for Stage 1 and Stage 2.

The 12 to 20 week timeline

Length varies with size and how much already exists. A typical three-standard build for a 120-person manufacturer runs like this.

Weeks 1 to 3. Gap analysis and design. Site visits, interviews at every level, the written report, and an agreed structure for the system.

Weeks 4 to 10. Build. Documentation, registers, process definition. Worked in blocks with your team rather than handed over as a finished folder, because a system written without them is a system nobody uses.

Weeks 11 to 14. Embed. Training, toolbox sessions, the system in live use. This is the phase most consultancies compress, and it is the phase that decides whether the certificate still means anything in two years.

Weeks 15 to 17. Internal audit and management review. A full audit cycle and the first management review, both of which the certification body will want evidence of.

Weeks 18 to 20. Certification. Stage 1 documentation review, corrective actions where needed, then Stage 2. We are there for both.

Certification bodies book up. We start that conversation around week 6, not week 18.

What it costs

£10,000 to £30,000, fixed, agreed after the gap analysis.

What moves the number: how many standards are in scope, headcount and number of sites, how much usable documentation already exists, and whether you have someone internally who can carry work between visits.

At the lower end, one or two standards, a single site, an existing quality system with decent bones. At the upper end, all three standards across multiple sites starting close to nothing.

The gap analysis is £900 on its own and is credited against the build if you go ahead. Certification body fees are separate and paid directly to them, typically £4,000 to £9,000 across a three-year cycle for a business this size. We will help you compare quotes.

The fee is fixed once the gap analysis is done. If the project takes longer than we estimated, that is our problem, not an invoice.

Single standard or integrated?

If you only need one standard for one customer, do one standard. Our ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 pages cover those, and a single-standard project runs £4,000 to £10,000.

Integrate when two or more standards are already on the horizon, when customers are asking for environmental or safety credentials alongside quality, when you have limited internal resource to run parallel systems, or when you already hold one standard and are adding a second.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Adding a second standard inside an integrated build costs roughly a third of doing it separately a year later, because the shared clauses are already written.

After certification

The certificate starts a three-year cycle: surveillance audit at twelve months, another at twenty-four, recertification at thirty-six. Systems drift between those visits, and drift turns up as findings.

Most clients move onto a retainer at handover, usually Active at £500 a month or Embedded at £1,050 a month, covering internal audits, legal register updates, corrective actions and certification body liaison. It costs less than the annual panic, and it is the reason our clients' surveillance audits are quiet.

You are not obliged to. The system is built to be run by your own people and we train them to run it. We would rather say up front that maintenance is real work than let you discover it at the first surveillance visit.

Who this is for

Manufacturers, logistics operators and industrial engineering firms between £10m and £100m turnover, usually 50 to 500 staff, in one of these positions:

A tier-one customer or a tender has made certification a condition of supply
You hold one standard and need a second or third without tripling the admin
An acquisition has left you with two part-systems and no single version of the truth
A cheap templated implementation didn't survive its first audit

Where we work

Greater Manchester and the North West as standard: Manchester, Bolton, Bury, Stockport, Rochdale, Oldham, Preston, Blackburn, Warrington and Altrincham. See all areas we cover. Builds elsewhere in the UK are taken on where the travel works for both sides.

How it starts

With a gap analysis. Two to three days on your site, a written report, and a fixed quote. You will know what the build costs before you commit to it, and the report is worth having even if you go elsewhere.

Book a gap analysis · Why integration works · Compliance Health Check