14001 Suppliers and Contractors - What control do you have?

[mjohnson]

I am curious how some of you out there are handling section 4.4.6c, Operational Control - "Suppliers and Contractors"? By handling I mean, what are you doing (i.e. how far are you exercising control over your suppliers and contractors, or attempting to excercise control)?

Our, evolving, system in a nutshell:
„h All contractors, in order to be listed on our "Approved Contractor List", must acknowledge that they have received our "Contractor Requirements" and agree that these requirements will be made available to any representative from their company that will perform work at our company.
„h Our "Contractor Requirements" include general, waste disposal, water management and operational issues.
„h For those contractors whose work can/does have a greater impact on the environment, there is a supplemental form for all items needed (if designated) such as:
1. Permits for TSD activities
2. Insurance carried
3. Insurance cert. With our company named as co-insured
4. Confirmation that there are training programs covering the following activities (i.e. "handling of haz. waste", transporting of haz. Materials")
„h We will have some signposts to information (procedures, instructions etc) in our safety and health contractor management program.
„h We are still working on the maintenance of the program (i.e. who and how are the contractor files maintained/updated, how is the information arranged/made available and what do we need to do about document and record control). Any advice here will be greatly appreciated!
„h Also, we have elected to exclude all raw materials and finished goods carriers from this program. This item is still in debate. Those EE's "FOR" the inclusion of all carriers argue that there is tremendous potential for environmental impact from these carriers. Those "AGAINST" argue that it is the suppliers responsibility and since each of our suppliers use any number of carriers in a given week¡Kit would be difficult to police. Any help here would also be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for any comments/suggestions,

Marc

 

[Randy]

What you are doing is OK....

 

[Luke Hannant]

Sounds good to me, We have a similar documents, although at the moment we have only extended them to control the contractors that work on site to ensure, they do not breach any environmental legislation, impacts are controlled etc.

The assessment of the contractors work practices takes place as part of an Environmental Induction, which all contractors (well contractor supervisors) must attend before starting any contract activities.

Not overly sure what we are going to do about suppliers.

 

[Tybee - 2011]

I have been tasked with the project of developing a manual and questiner for our supliers on what our requirements should be for them regarding ISO14001

I need help

 

[Sidney Vianna]

I have been tasked with the project of developing a manual and questiner for our supliers on what our requirements should be for them regarding ISO14001

I need help

You can get some ideas from https://www.canon.com/procurement/green.html & (broken link removed)

Please note that (and using ISO 14001 terminology), you can INFLUENCE your suppliers in terms of their environmental performance. But you need to be careful about enforcing environmental requirements (product, process and systems related) onto suppliers without a holistic analysis.

 

[Paul Simpson]

I have been tasked with the project of developing a manual and questiner for our supliers on what our requirements should be for them regarding ISO14001

I need help

First you need to ask yourself what you are trying to achieve. If the purpose is simply to get a questionnaire and manual together then you are creating a negative environmental impact for no benefit and believe me there are plenty out here who have done this!

I think this is the management systems equivalent of an urban myth.

"If we are going for certification we need to check whether our suppliers are certified."

However you may have done the aspects significance job properly and identified that suppliers working on your site need to be aware of site controls - so some sort of instruction with details of what they can bring onto your site and how they must deal with spills / waste may be appropriate.

In your aspects register you may also have identified the supply chain (and the products they supply you) as being significant - in which case a questionnaire looking at what they do and how they control it may be appropriate. A lot depends again on what you intend to do with the information when it comes back. If the answer is "nothing" then .... save the trees!

 

[SteelMaiden]

Just remember that there are varying degrees of control needed between on-site contractors and of-site suppliers. Make sure it is well documented.

 

[SaintStan]

Contractors is fairly self explanatory, most straight forward companies do the same thing: Handbook, induction, etc.

Supplier requirements for operational control & general supplier management is a different animal and depends entirely on how your system is set-up.

E.g. if you have an objective to reduce the amount of cardboard waste, you would prefer that your suppliers send you in orders in non-cardboard packaging thus contributing to your objective. You need the operational control to ensure that the orders are sent in in non-cardboard and communicate this to your supplier. Further to this, if supplied goods packaging is an environmental business issue, it should be documented as an aspect/impact accordingly, thus closing the loop.

This is just one example, a more serious issue is where legal compliance for supplied goods is a requirement.