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Mending the patchwork of requirements from multiple standards using participative goal modelling: a case in the food industry

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Abstract

An increasing number of concurrent standards and regulations is being imposed on organizations operating in various domains. From healthcare to automotive to food, demands from national legislation, directives of each target market, and edicts from specific clients are creating a patchwork of requirements for compliance and audit. Managing these disconnected frameworks involves considerable overhead, duplications, and conflicts. But integrating and harmonizing these requirements needs the collaboration of varied stakeholders, with different trainings and backgrounds, capable of translating the impacts of the various norms in the different sectors of the organization. We propose a participative goal-oriented approach, consisting of four steps, to assist in this process. It brings together the requirements from the various regulations, the organizational goals, and measurement indicators. We describe its use in a company operating in the food industry, one of the most regulated in the world, where audits are very frequent, to integrate ISO 22000, IFS Food, and BRC Global Standards. Our findings show that an effective integration of the multiple regulations was possible and that the resulting goal diagrams are an effective tool for communicating with various stakeholders, such as employees, clients, auditors, consultants, and representatives of industry initiatives.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CTCV, Technological Center, Coimbra, Portugal

    João Barata

  2. ISMT, Miguel Torga Institute, Coimbra, Portugal

    João Barata

  3. ESTGOH, Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, Oliveira do Hospital, Portugal

    João Barata

  4. CISUC, Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    João Barata & Paulo Rupino da Cunha

Authors
  1. João Barata
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  2. Paulo Rupino da Cunha
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to João Barata.

Appendix

Appendix

This appendix provides additional detail on how goal modelling was used for integrating and managing multiple standards in the food company. Figure 6 shows and excerpt of the traditional annual plan of the organizational goals.

Fig. 6
figure 6

Annual objectives of the food company

Full size image

The spreadsheet represented above includes the main goals for the integrated system (column 2), grouped by the context (column 1), the target and indicator (columns 3 and 4), and the relation to the adopted standards. The main problems with this existing approach are:

  1. (6)

    It links goals with individual clauses of each standard, but does not address cases of goals that may be associated with multiple interrelated clauses of the standards;

  2. (7)

    It does not provide a clear indication of missing clauses and the interrelations between goals or indicators;

  3. (8)

    The spreadsheet is created at the end of the previous year and usually assessed at the end of the following year, lacking support for daily use or guidance on how to comply with the standards requirements;

  4. (9)

    It does not trace to tasks involved in accomplishing the stated goals of the organization;

  5. (10)

    It lacks pedagogic support to understand the requirements of the standards and their practical adoption in the organization.

The model included in Fig. 7 replaces the tabular presentation of Fig. 6, with several advantages:

  1. (11)

    It increases rigour and traceability, revealing that goals may affect other goals and clauses of different standards, for example, “Implement electronic audit records in production lines (mobile system)” contributes to a company goal to reduce nonconformities and to a requirement of a standard for planning the food safety management system;

  2. (12)

    It includes the tasks involved in accomplishing the objectives, at different levels of abstraction; for example, for actor food company Line 4 (bottom right), it becomes clear that the improvements that will lead to increased production simultaneously play a part in reducing complaints (associated with response time) and increase income;

  3. (13)

    It improves the awareness of participants over the integrated system and the interconnections between goals, tasks, and compliance to standards.

Fig. 7
figure 7

New GRL-based model for the integrated management system

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Figure 7 presents an excerpt of the goal model for the food company Line 4 (sauce production), created using our proposal.

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Barata, J., da Cunha, P.R. Mending the patchwork of requirements from multiple standards using participative goal modelling: a case in the food industry. Requirements Eng 23, 425–441 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-017-0268-8

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