Recognising a need to reduce work-related injuries and illness and increase employee involvement in occupational health and safety (OH&S), Corrosion Resistant Products Ltd (CRP) set their sights on obtaining ISO 45001 certification.
Rick Payne, Quality Manager at CRP, led the project to achieve certification. He said, “I really wanted to do something significant, and with impact, to embed safety as a core business priority.”
ISO certification can be a significant undertaking, but Rick found the features and benefits of Make UK’s Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) software invaluable in capturing and recording information for each requirement of the standard.
Background
CRP develops and manufactures high-quality fluoropolymer lined metal piping systems, associated pipeline equipment, and sampling systems, which they ship globally from their base in North Manchester, UK. They specialise in producing solutions for industries that handle the most challenging chemicals, such as the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors where quality is paramount.
Although CRP were compliant with health and safety regulations, meeting all necessary legal requirements, there was a lack of safety ownership and a lingering risk of incidents.
Rick recognised an opportunity for improvement and targeted ISO 45001 as a structured framework to identify, control, and reduce risks, ultimately protecting employees from harm and promoting a proactive culture of health and safety.
The Standard and The Challenges
Introduced in March 2018, ISO 45001 was the first international standard for OH&S at work. The standard consists of seven key components and provides a framework for organisations to manage OH&S risk and opportunities through a process led approach.
The time, effort, and cost involved in implementing ISO 45001 varies depending on several factors, including business risk profile, robustness of current processes, and team resources, but can be significant.
At CRP, this was perhaps made even more challenging as they lacked detailed in-house knowledge of the standard.
Rick says, “My background is in quality, so although I was able to draw on learnings from implementing ISO 9001 previously … my expertise was not in this [ISO 45001] standard. Further to this, I inherited various formats and styles of documentation and procedures, detailing compliance to legislation or best practice, to greater or lesser levels of compliance, accuracy and detail, from previous incumbents of the health and safety manager position. Bringing these disparate elements together into an updated standardised format was one of the most challenging projects I have taken on in a career in management systems implementation.”
Support and Software
CRP have been Make UK members for almost 30 years and Rick worked closely with Make’s UK Environment, Health and Safety consultants for support and guidance on the journey to ISO 45001.
Rick found Make’s UK EHS software particularly valuable as this provided a structured format to enable him to work through the requirements of the standard step-by-step. Templates, expertly developed by the Make UK EHS team, provided a solid base for Rick to build on and personalise for CRP’s use.
This has involved the creation of risk assessments and method statements for all areas and activities within the business, including a full revamping of the company COSHH register, where the EHS software proved invaluable in providing a standardised structured format for the assessments, including document and web links, supporting information and evidence such as documents, photographs and supplier websites.
Incident and accident reporting and investigation also benefit from the software’s design, with each incident record in a centralised location with supporting documentation: eyewitness statements, photographs, training records and certificates linked directly to the record. A feature of the accident and incident module is the inclusion of a 5 Why/Root Cause Analysis extension to the template, which provides evidence of the rationale for identifying and implementing appropriate and effective actions to prevent recurrence of the incident.
The software also includes a task scheduler to allow planning of actions arising from accidents and incidents, risk assessments and ongoing systems maintenance. A review manger function within each record allows the planning of risk assessment and documentation reviews, ensuring all elements of the management system are kept up to date in a planned and logical manner.
Mark Stubbs, EHS Consultant at Make UK, said, “We are constantly reviewing the information contained within the software to ensure templates and guidance reflect ongoing best practice. Make UK’s team of EHS and software experts meet on a weekly basis to discuss improvements and make necessary amends.”
A further useful feature of the software is the dashboard function which allows data visualisation of all records within the system, and which has supported the requirements of the ISO 45001 standard for monitoring and measurement as well as communication with employees and other interested parties.
Rick commented, “Frankly, the software is eminently suitable for much larger multi-site organisations. For a single main user, the software offered an embarrassment of riches, and we had to learn to scale its functionality to our operations. One of the beauties of the software is that whilst the format of the records within it is fixed, it is totally flexible in how it is deployed and utilised, allowing us to find our own methods to get the best out of it. The support we received from Make UK and the EHS team in response to our queries, arising from the implementation process, was second to none.”
Rick joins other Make UK members in a monthly forum, which takes place virtually, to discuss software usage as well as share information and learning.
Reflecting on the certification process Rick continued, “One of the most impressive features of the software is the inclusion of numerous templates for inspections, checklists and audits. The fire risk assessment template is particularly well designed, and user friendly.
We used the template for ISO 45001 gap analysis to check our conformance status against the standard clause by clause – completion of the gap analysis gave us the confidence to proceed with both Part 1 and Part 2 certification audits – both of which we passed with zero non-conformances, major or minor, an absolutely fantastic result.”
The results of the certification audit and the positive comments from the auditor regarding our use of the software and its integration into our management system demonstrate how well we were able to adapt the software to our business, and how well the software supports our ambitions to provide a superlative health and safety working environment for our people.”
Certification
CRP achieved certification in September 2024 having started their journey in the Autumn of 2022.
The overall impact of this certification is the results of OHASMS implementation have been a reduction in the severity and number of accidents and near misses, including a reduction in RIDDOR reportable lost time accidents to zero in 2024.
Further to this, workforce engagement with health and safety has improved significantly following the implementation of the software. The metrics produced led to a noticeable increase in engagement, with employees from all areas raising more hazard reports and providing valuable comments and feedback.
Sandor Bali, Manufacturing Team Leader, has seen the impact firsthand: “I have seen engagement and a shift in the way we think about manufacturing a product. Previous processes we used at CRP have been reviewed and adapted with health and safety in mind. For example, in Bellows, we are trialing tooling designed to assist with tasks that require considerable strength and physical effort. This shift has been reinforced by the health and safety training we’ve all undertaken at CRP, placing safety at the forefront of our minds. Instead of addressing it after an incident, we’ve adopted a proactive mindset focused on prevention.”
