Getting the best from companies

Best4 is a new quality, environment, safety and social accountability integrated certification scheme being offered by RINA. “It is a measure of the business excellence of a company and its capacity to carry out sustainable tasks in terms of management of the company for safety at sea, safety of life and the safety of all the personnel employed if it is in industry,” says Roberto Cazzulo, RINA?s marine

division technical function co-ordinator.

It includes environment protection and emergency procedures that avoid any impact on the environment both for normal operation and for casualties. “It is about quality management and, perhaps the area of innovation is inclusion of the social accountability section,” explains Cazzulo.

The importance of the certification scheme is that a company is able to prove that it includes all these four basic elements, which is why it is called Best4.

Costa Crociere is the first group to go through the process and is the first company to receive the Best4 certification by RINA. “I can understand why a cruise ship company like Costa has been the first in achieving this certification because it is suitable for companies in industry that have in their policies the need to ensure their great competitiveness on the market but also have a respect for passengers and their large number of employees such as you have on large cruise ships,” he told The Motor Ship. Others in the marine market are following suit and are currently undergoing the certification process. However, it is not a process that can be completed in a very short time. It took Costa approximately one year to complete the process although part of that time was down to the learning process for both Costa and RINA and partly down to the fact that there is a reference to four or five international certification schemes for issuing the Best4 certification, requiring some careful consideration.

Cazzulo explains: “there were perhaps some parts of the scheme where Costa was simply reviewing their procedures and in other parts of the scheme, for example, about social accountability it was a matter of reconsidering parts of their policy and putting it into procedures.” He says that this is new in general for shipping companies.

The time taken also depends on the size and the complexity of the company. It is a scheme that cannot be delivered to companies unless they have the highest levels of quality, environmental protection and social accountability.

Social accountability

He told The Motor Ship: “the social accountability part of the scheme is the newest part and we are talking about aspect such as child labour, forced labour, health and safety, right of collective bargaining, discrimination, working hours, discipline and compensation ? these are all aspects closely related to the human element. Companies have to have the highest standards concerning their personal policies, employment of people and respect of human rights. This can get a lot more complicated when a company employs multi-nationals as it could even cover religious or ethical aspects that vary from one nationality to another. This is the case with most cruise ship companies.”

The certification is not just limited to marine companies either and Cazzulo says: “It is a good example of the synergies within a classification society such as RINA, which does not have only the marine sector certification but has wide experience in industry certification as well and we have used the expertise of both certification divisions to develop this scheme.” It is for this reason that there are experts from both divisions in the auditing team. n