Industrial and Safety - Product quality and safety
The Industrial and Safety division is committed to providing customers with safe products by continuing to improve standards, controls and processes in high-risk product safety areas, especially own-brand products.
The division continues to maintain its commitment to zero own-brand product recalls and there were zero recalls required by the regulator during the year. This is supported by critical paths within the sourcing and new product development workflow for factory and product-level compliance. Recall pages to support customer communications are located on the Blackwoods, Bullivants and NZ Safety Blackwoods websites.
External accreditations
Blackwoods, Bullivants, Coregas and Workwear Group continue to maintain ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management System accreditation. Bullivants and Coregas maintain ISO/IEC 17025 and 17034 NATA Accreditation for Laboratories. Coregas continues to maintain its licences to produce medical gases with all filling sites rated at the highest A1 level.
Blackwoods engages with national and international brands as part of its Supplier Assurance and Risk Management Program, which aims to better understand suppliers’ performance across operational activities, such as product safety, quality, compliance and responsible sourcing. During the year, Blackwoods engaged a further 26 suppliers, bringing the total number of suppliers participating in the program to 93. Blackwoods completed the development of minimum requirements during the year, which is used to guide suppliers on minimum policy and operational requirements. This cloud-based platform will enable access to performance and assurance information and interactive dashboards to feed back to category teams and suppliers. Blackwoods aims to use the data in the 2025 financial year for supplier partnership initiatives that will add benefits within the value chain, such as decarbonisation, packaging or responsible sourcing activities.
NZ Safety Blackwoods continues to develop its Quality Management System by mapping all critical path processes, introducing a standardised customer complaint reporting form and using the MyOsh quality module to record actions.
Coregas continues its participation in the Australia New Zealand Industrial Gas Association’s product stewardship working group.
Workwear Group delivered product quality training for suppliers and in-country teams to better mitigate the risk of potential non-conformances. The training module included topics on service level agreements, ethical sourcing guidelines, modern slavery compliance, product quality responsibilities and trust and verify auditing. Other specific product safety and quality training tools included subjects such as the revised Hi-Vis standard, testing protocols and heat seal applications and product certifications. These topics were clearly explained to ensure Workwear Group’s supply partners understand its expectations, working towards reducing the risk of potential non-conformances.