What's Inside?
1. Important Details of Pre-Assessment Document (PAD) You Need to Know.
2. What Unified Approach Can You Apply to Different Management Systems?
3. How Best to Organize the Hierarchy of Your SQAS Documents?
4. Useful CEFIC Guidelines and Other White Papers to Consider When Preparing for SQAS Certification or Assessment.
5. Possible Bottlenecks in Preparing for SQAS Assessment in 2023 and How to Avoid Them.
Convert Compliance into Growth in 2023
SQAS Assessment - SQAS Certificate
- Behavior-Based Safety
- Greenhouse Gas Emissions
- Safety, Health, Environment and Quality
- Risk Management
- Emergency Preparedness and Response
- Performance Analysis
- Management of Subcontractors
- DGSA, OCS, HR, Security and others
TIME
Firstly, speed up the preparation for SQAS certification by 3 times compared to a long own decoding of all items of two questionnaires.
MONEY
Secondly, be sure that your most competent employees continue to earn money for the company without being distracted from work.
SCORE
Thirdly, forget about the uncertainty in SQAS certification preparation results – they will always be above 80 points.
Confused by Questions?
We have the Answers!
You may ask if there is any reason to get SQAS certified
SQAS has the same foundation as the ISO standards, but an assessor checks conformity differently. There is an SQAS attestation procedure (or SQAS assessment) for this.
1 So the first reason: about 30 years ago, large chemical companies created SQAS for their logistics contractors. Now this assessment system is supported by the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) to ensure safety and quality of logistics operations in chemical supply chains. You can think of SQAS as expressing the very practical requirements of large chemical manufacturers.
2 The second reason follows from the first: consequently, if you want to provide your logistics services to the biggest chemical clients, then you need to go through a tender procedure with a mandatory condition for having a valid SQAS Certificate (or more correctly, Assessment Report). So, get ready to convert compliance into growth for your business.
3 The third reason: SQAS is currently the most advanced tool for the development of logistics companies in the chemical industry. The site sqas.org updates questionnaires annually, incorporating the best practices of the chemical industry. Logistics companies that carefully prepare for the SQAS certification, and then get 95+ scores, show their real leadership. Naturally, after that, they get the best clients!
FAQ: What you need to know about SQAS assessment?
SQAS is used to assess companies from the sectors:
- transportation and forwarding,
- warehousing,
- tank container cleaning stations,
- rail transport,
- distributors of chemical products.
SQAS Certificate (Assessment Report) confirms the ability of logistics companies and distributors to provide their services to customers at the proper level. When selecting a contractor, SQAS attestation provides chemical manufacturers with a unified scale for evaluating logistics partners.
The SQAS assessment report reflects the results as a percentage of accepted responses out of the total number of items on the SQAS questionnaire. There are about 450 of them totally.
For example, according to the results of the assessment, the company received 78% or 78 “scores”, in other words. This means that out of 450 items of the questionnaire, only 350 items were taken into account. Proper documents and interviews with the specialists of the company confirmed them right. Only an authorized expert accredited by the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) carries out the assessment.
The average European result of a SQAS assessment is currently around 75 scores. For some, even 70 scores will be enough. But companies seeking to prove their leadership in safety and quality of logistics services to chemical customers are diligently preparing for the SQAS assessment to score well over 80.
SQAS is a so-called integrated management system. Its feature is that it establishes a unified approach to managing completely different functional types of business activities. For example: quality of logistics services, safety and health, environment, behavior-based safety, etc.
And the more business processes you have to connect to an integrated management system, the more complex it becomes. In 2023, the questionnaire became more complex as nearly 80 SQAS items were updated or added as new. The biggest changes have occurred in the SQAS sections on greenhouse gas emissions, plastic waste prevention and digitalization.
You need to get ready for an SQAS certification (SQAS attestation) quickly, with reliable results. Therefore, you will receive as a trusted resource our 10+ years of experience preparing logistics companies for SQAS assessments, including those with 95+ scores.
In a relatively short time (3-4 months), your employees will carry out upgrade of competencies, business processes, and documentation – everything in line with SQAS requirements. We will be in touch with you from the moment of the accurate application for assessment (Pre-Assessment Document) until receipt of an electronic copy of the SQAS Assessment Report.
Certainly, we will work together with you to prepare all the necessary 450 items of the SQAS questionnaires. We usually use Zoom for our consulting support, but using your other corporate communications platform won’t be a problem either.
Preparing for SQAS Assessment
*)The diagram is a comparative illustration of the benefits that a logistics company can get when preparing for SQAS assessment with our help. It can start with a SQAS competency level of about 40 scores and prepare either on its own and spend about 9 months on preparation, or with us and speed up to 3 months. The situation shown in the diagram is quite typical. You get time saving and quality of preparation, which ultimately brings profit. So yes, you can get a SQAS certificate x3 faster even with higher scores.
Preparation on your own for the assessment always stretches for a long time and there are many reasons for this. For example, if you are conducting the attestation for the first time, then the employees of your company need time to familiarize themselves with SQAS questionnaires. If you already conducted an assessment 3 years ago, it often happens that your employee, who previously led the assessment project, has been promoted and can no longer do so. Requirements of SQAS are updated annually, therefore even a knowledgeable specialist needs time to deal with the new items of the questionnaire, etc.
To sum up, over 10 years of working with SQAS, we have developed the approach that considers not only a deep understanding of the logic of requirements but also the overall internal dynamics of a project based on principles of change management.
🤓When preparing for such a complex assessment as SQAS, it is important to be able to work with the hierarchy of documents.
✍️Certification documents are accumulating more and more, and if you do not specifically pay attention to this, then at some point, the internal logic and interconnection of elements in the integrated management system may be lost.
💡In order to make the priorities in the tasks set clearer, we recommend that our clients, when preparing for certification, rely on those official documents that are stated in the SQAS questionnaires. If you use them correctly, you can find a lot of useful things in them.
📌Now they are collected (a lot of them) in one place and you do not need to search for them in many …
👉Chemical supply chains are constantly changing due to global challenges. All this creates a constant rotation – some logistics companies reduce their work with chemical cargoes, others, on the contrary, increase them.
📈The demand for SQAS in the world is growing from year to year. The European database alone contains about 3,000 SQAS-certified logistics companies from 30+ countries. In addition, similar requirements are typical for the assessment systems adopted in the states of the Persian Gulf (GULF SQAS), Africa (SQAS-AFRICA), China (CRSAS) and Brazil (SASSMAQ).
✅The advantage of a single logistic assessment for an extended set of main SHEQS indicators is obvious. Chemical …
What should be considered in preparing for the SQAS assessment in 2023?
SQAS is an integrated management system. Its feature is that it establishes a unified approach to managing completely different functional types of business activities. For example: quality of logistics services, safety and health, environment, behavior-based safety, etc.
And the more business processes you have to connect to an integrated management system, the more complex it becomes. In 2023, the questionnaire became more complex, as nearly 80 SQAS items were updated or added as new. The biggest changes have occurred in the SQAS sections on greenhouse gas emissions, plastic waste prevention and digitalization.
…
⁉️How many SQAS scores do I need for my company in order to have a good chance of winning a chemical manufacturer tender?
👉The SQAS assessment report reflects the results as a percentage of accepted responses to the total number of items on the SQAS questionnaire. In total, there are a maximum of about 450, but the exact number depends on the specifics of the logistics company.
🔖For example, according to the results of the assessment, the company received 78% or 78 “points”, in other words. This means that out of 450 items in the questionnaire, only 350 items were taken into account. Proper documents and interviews with the company’s specialists confirmed their correctness. Please note that the assessment is carried out only by an authorized assessor accredited by the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC). …
