NVD are Ireland’s leading car transport and logistics company with offices, compounds and/or workshops in New Ross, Baldonnell, Ringaskiddy, Kill and Rosslare. They have been certified to ISO9001 since 2003 and in 2013, they engaged Asgard Management Solutions to help add ISO14001 and OHSAS18001 to their certification through an integrated management system.
In December 2013, we started the process by conducting an operational control review of all locations. This purpose of this review was to identify at an early stage any significant HSE-related issues that may require investment or longer-term actions. The next step was to identify the environmental aspects and impacts related to their activities and to determine which of those were significant. These significant aspects then later formed the basis of the environmental objectives and improvement programme. The H&S risks and hazards were already identified through the company safety statement and again, significant hazards formed the basis of the H&S improvement programme.
We then set about documenting the system in line with ISO14001/OHSAS18001 documentation requirements. Our aim was to fully integrate these systems with the existing ISO9001 QMS and given the differences that existed in the standards at the time, this proved challenging but following the structure laid down in PAS99, we successfully drafted an IMS manual and supporting procedures. The new system operated for a period of approximately 3 months at which time we returned to conduct an internal audit of the system across all locations. We addressed the issues that arose during the audit, conducted a management review and were ready for our certification audit. The 9-day audit was a very thorough testing of the IMS but despite the pressures of the audit, NVD were certified to all 3 standards in early 2015.
We continue to work with NVD to the point where we now fulfil the role of SHEQ Manager within the organisation. This involves maintaining the IMS through monitoring and development, auditing the IMS across all sites throughout the year and growing the IMS in line with the rapid growth of the company. In addition, we successfully transitioned the ISO9001 and ISO14001 elements of their IMS to the 2015 versions at their recertification audit in November 2017.
