09 Oct Even safer. ISO 45001 certified

This past month of August we became ISO 45001 certified after effecting the migration from OHSAS 18001.

This project began in 2015 when we decided to improve the safety conditions of Rieusset employees by opting for certification in a standard that would help us achieve this. Although certification is voluntary, our decision to do this was meant as a public commitment of the company’s will to carry out improvements in the area of work safety.

We chose OHSAS 18001 certification as an Occupational Health and Safety Management System, whose objective is to help the company provide safe and healthy working conditions in order to prevent injury and health-related illness.

Advantages of implementing a Health and Safety Standard

· Reducing accidents at work through the prevention and control of labor risks.
· Guaranteeing compliance with the legal requirements for occupational risk prevention.
· Minimizing fines, material losses and interruptions of the production process caused by work-related accidents, avoiding costs and decreases in the quantity and quality of the achieved production, and ultimately, in the productivity of the organization.
· Increasing employee motivation and satisfaction.

Why the change to ISO 45001?

At Rieusset we work to comply with the regulations in all areas, and adapting ourselves to any new versions of such regulations or migrating to new standards is part of our DNA.

Therefore, when ISO 45001 was published last year we immediately began to prepare the migration with the aim of becoming certified in 2019.

We must say that the changes proposed by the new regulations came as no surprise to us, since in light of the evolution undergone by ISO 14001 and ISO 9001 we had already started to prepare ourselves, assuming that the same would happen with Health and Safety certification –as has in effect occurred with ISO 45001– and we believe will happen with the Food Safety regulations.

What changes are proposed by ISO 45001?

In the new ISO 45001:2018 there is a High Level Standard (HLS) which means that it has clauses such as “context of the organization, leadership and planning” in addition to all the requirements in common with different norms that have the same number of clauses, structure and format enabling integration with the different management systems.

With the ISO 45001 standard, Management must assume the leadership to ensure its correct performance, this being the most important difference with regard to OHSAS 18001.

We can also mention that the new standard places greater focus toward prevention as opposed to correction.

Principal changes in ISO 45001
· Context of the organization: Chapter 4.1, external and internal matters, introduces new clauses for the determination and systematic supervision of the organization’s context.
· Workers and other interested parties: Chapter 4.2 introduces a greater attention to the needs and expectations of the workers and other interested parties, as well as the participation of the employees. This is in order to systematically identify and comprehend the factors that must be managed through the management system.
· Risk and opportunities management: Described in chapters 6.1.1, 6.1.2.3 and 6.1.4, companies must determine, consider, and if necessary, take measures to address any risk or opportunity that might affect (either positively or negatively) the capacity of the management system to obtain the foreseen results, including the improvement of health and safety in the workplace.
· Leadership and commitment by Management:Chapter 5.1, ISO 45001 places greater emphasis on the need for High Management to actively commit itself and accept the responsibility for the effectiveness of the management system. 
· Objectives and achievement: Greater emphasis on objectives as the driving force behind improvements (chapters 6.2.1, 6.2.2) and the evaluation of achievement (chapter 9.1.1).

There is also a series of extended requisites concerning:
· Consultation and participation of the workers (5.4)
· Communication (7.4): More prescriptive with regard to the “mechanics” of communication, including the determination of what, when and how to communicate
· Purchases, including external contracting and the contractors (8.1.4)

Lastly, we would like to advise that those of you who have OHSAS 18001 and want to maintain Health and Safety certification have to migrate to the ISO 45001 standard before March 2021.