Introducing Environmental Management Accounting into Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Abstract

The Industry Association of Brescia (AIB) has recently started a programme to promote environment management systems (EMSs) and safety management systems (SMSs) among its small and medium-sized (SME) member companies, with the aim of the continuous improvement of plant safety. The programme is based on the premise that plant safety is closely related to the quality of the organisation, to which the EMS and SMS can contribute.

To support this programme, a research campaign was launched to collect data and gain the experience necessary to overcome the present reluctance of almost all the SMEs for these systems. This four-year campaign involves sixty pilot companies of differing sizes, operating in different industrial fields and already having quality management systems (QMS) implemented and certified. In these pilot companies firstly an EMS and subsequently a SMS will be implemented.

Despite the very favourable conditions offered to the pilot companies and the high level of confidence between the association and its members, very few companies initially agreed to implement the proposed systems. However these difficulties were overcome and the campaign is now successfully in progress. The experts are now working ‘in the field’ in more than twenty pilot companies, which will have a certified EMS implemented by early 2002, and another forty are on the waiting list.

The analysis of operational costs played a viral role in gathering and convincing the pipilot companies, which were interested primarily in reducing operational costs as part of their production costs. A lot of attention was therefore devoted to this: starting from the QMS costs and following a particular approach, the companies have been assisted not only in implementing an EMA system, but also in improving their accounting systems generally.

These considerations, together with the work already performed in the campaign, will be addressed in the paper.

This paper reports on the design of and initial results from a research project which is also the subject of the following paper, Venturelli and Pilisi “EMA in SMEs: Ten Italian Case Studies”. These papers are intended to be read together, in the sequence in which they appear in this book.

The authors wish to thank Andrea Gandellini — Manager of “ECO 90” — for his fundamental advice and for his willingness.