Benchmarking environmental audit programs: Best practices and biggest challenges

Abstract

As Total Quality Management (TQM) has become an important concept in learning how to manage environmental, health, and safety audit programs more effectively, an especially useful. TQM tool has been competitive benchmarking. Companies are using benchmarking studies to identify “best practices” that could be incorporated into their programs. In conducting benchmarking studies, evaluators often also identify the biggest common challenges facing audit program managers. This article discusses these best practices and biggest challenges associated with environmental audit programs. The conclusions are based on a number of benchmarking studies and third‐party evaluations of corporate audit programs. As the sources are necessarily limited to the author's own experiences, there are no doubt many other specific best practices that are not discussed in this article. These will surface over time. Copyright © 1994 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company