"System Safety"

Formal presentation of "System Safety" certification to Herding GmbH Filtertechnik

"System Safety" certification was formally handed over on 6 May 2011, by Mr. Karl Hoenig of the German Wood and Metal Association, to Herding GmbH Filtertechnik. The company was here represented by its Managing Director Dr. Urs Herding, the production manager Wolfgang Raabe, the management representative, Volker Herding, workplace-safety specialist, Manfred Daucher, and other safety personnel and sectional heads.

In his opening speech, Volker Herding outlined Herding GmbH Filtertechnik’s corporate philosophy, based first and foremost on the following five key principles: Safety as a foremost priority, compliance with statutory regulations, quality and performance assurance, compliance with delivery times and economical use of resources.

Implementing this corporate philosophy, enables the customer requirements, coming from the widest range of industrial sectors (from the chemical to the automotive industry), to be met with regard, among other things, to the newly certified work-safety management system. The system is applied in all phases of the development of Herding® dust-extraction equipment, ultimately ensuring safe and reliable installation and start-up of equipment on customers' premises. Safety experts and sectional directors, from across the company, are essential to the implementation of the system in the workplace.

The trade association representative, Mr. Karl Hoenig, said in his speech that such associations are above all responsible for prevention, and that the work-safety management system is to be seen, here, as an appropriate means providing this. Use of the system significantly reduces the number of accidents at work and occurrence of occupational sicknesses and disease, and already moreover meets the international ILO-OSH 2001 standard.

Although the system is offered by all trade associations in Germany, currently only 150 of 150,000 German Wood and Metal Association (Berufsgenossenschaft Holz und Metall [BGHM]) member companies are certified. Herding is one of those few companies that, after initial discussions in 2010, was awarded the certificate, as a result of what was already a high standard, in this company, in terms of safety in the workplace.

The company incurs no consultancy fees through the trade association’s support and certification, the company concerned merely bearing the internal costs of the certification.

In his closing speech, Dr. Urs Herding thanked all those who had contributed to implementing the work safety management-system. Use of such a system is important, particularly with demographic change, with increasingly older employees, in mind. An important part of this is that employees' capacity for work is retained, independently of their age and stage of life. Moreover, use of this system takes employees’ health, in particular, into account, and meets the high level of customer demand for safe, reliable installation and maintenance on their premises. All this goes towards securing the company’s future.