Boutes’ ISO 14 001 certification was renewed last December. But this is no reason for us to be complacent. This quality process has to be one of continual improvement. Managers at Boutes have taken the initiative to include an entire section on employee safety in the certification.
In January 2010 Boutes was certified to ISO 14001 environmental management standard. Last December, this certification was renewed, to the satisfaction of both the managers and the staff, but the process does not stop there, far from it! “We have to maintain this certification, we have to continue to motivate the staff, and improve our environmental management still further”, explained Julien Ségura,commercial and marketing manager, especially as the managers have now decided to add a new section to the certification, based on employee safety.
“This is not a requirement of standard ISO 14 001, but we believe that it is important, in addition to environmental safety, to add further commitments in terms of human safety, like ensuring that work is not too physically demanding, for example. We did not want to restrict ourselves just to the minimum required by the law or by the standard.” The company decided to work closely with the taff to identify existing risks and look for ways of coping with them. Every Wednesday, over a period of one and a half months, all the employees, including the administrative staff, worked together in small groups. “The employees were certainly best placed to come up with solutions for coping with risks”, observed Julien Ségura. “This is the main strength of the company’s plan. The employees really put a lot of work into this”, pointed out Philippe Trouvé, head of quality, safety and environment. “It is true that on a subject like this we have to consult with the employees: they are the ones who have experienced back problems, tendonitis, injuries from iron filings, for example.”
Current regulations state that it is compulsory to produce a single risk assessment document, which should be revised every year, and updated whenever necessary, if new machines or new processes are introduced. When the employees met together in their working groups they checked the risks that had been identified for each work station and assessed the dangers according to their frequency and their seriousness. They also proposed solutions, “for example, a safety chain to prevent the temporary hoop that is put round the barrel from opening suddenly during toasting, fastened quite simply with a pin”, noted the quality manager. The employees’suggestions were then studied by the managers. For the time being, a decision has been taken to build a loading platform. “This represents an investment of 20,000 to 30,000 euros. We do not have a safe platform for loading barrels into the containers. Loading is carried out at three levels, and can be at a height of as much as 4 metres, so there is a considerable risk that a barrel could fall onto the employee, even though very specific instructions about good loading practice are provided.”
The safety element that Boutes has included in its ISO 14 001 certification also covers other points, like maintaining machines in perfect working order and standard compliant, checking electrical circuits regularly, fire prevention measures (thermography, drills), etc.
“This entire process represents a major improvement, and one which is of great benefit to the company and the staff”, summed up Julien Ségura. This entire operation and all the resources that the cooperage has put in place to meet the general requirements of standard ISO 14 001 will be considered during our “practice” audit planned for next autumn, two months before the annual compliance audit carried out by the Afnor group. To date, Boutes is the first cooperage in France to have obtained this international certification, which demonstrates our total commitment to respect for the environment and also, from now on, to maximum safety at work.
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