case Study

My name is Mark Stein. I work for Kerneos, we are a calcium aluminate cement manufacturer located in Virginia. I am a project manager. We are the only producer of calcium aluminate cement in North America.

A while back, three or four years ago, we had a challenge to take our safety program into the 18001 OHSAS standard. We attempted to look through the standard ourselves and saw that it was going to be very stressful to us, very complex. We had a good program and were very challenged to find out how we were going to accomplish this 18001 OHSAS standard. We actually started out with a company that was very strict to the standard, line item per line item. It made it very complicated for us to have our system integrate into the 18001 standard. This gave us a lot of challenges in order to put this into 18001. So we actually got rid of this company, and went out on the market. We found a person, and his name is Damon. When we talked to him he came on site and audited our program and did a gap analysis, and we figured out that the things that we have on our site, the programs and training, actually was a good system, and Damon helped us to put a new program together under 18001 that made it very comfortable for our company to take our system that we have now and put it into 18001 where there was little changes to our existing system. So all the stress that we were worried about was not necessary. Damon helped us out tremendously to put together this program, and we are very proud of it, and we use it very, very well every year. So that worked out very well for our company, and to this day we have annual audits that go very well. We live this safety plan. It works very well for us.