A research thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Administration, School of Management

Research Studies Project Report (M.B.A.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1996

ISO 14001 standard will be the next fever after the successful ISO 9000 series, some expert say. The newest international standard is eyeing for the environmental management of the daily operation of a business unit. People would automatically think that the implementation of any kind of environmental management system or EMS would only create benefit for the external environment, but not directly to the business unit itself. But this research study has taken several UK companies, which have been certified to BS 7750 and EMAS, the predecessor of ISO 14001 standard and one Thai company which is planning to certify to ISO 14001 standard, as the examples to analyze the perceptions of related costs and benefits when implementing the EMS. The author interviewed all the four companies and personally talked to the people who were in charge of implementing and maintaining the EMS. Through a scoring model, the author quantified the major costs and benefits based on the perceptions of all interviewees and the made the comparison. The result that the author has found is on the perceptions of costs and benefits analyses, it does have large internal benefits when a company implementing ISO 14001 .