The Southern African Plastic Pipe Manufactures Association (SAPPMA) hosted its fourth virtual quality workshop of the year, entitled “Understanding the synergistic effect of combining Risk Management, Total Cost of Quality and a functional Quality Management System”.

Explaining the reason for selecting this topic, SAPPMA Technical Manage Ian Venter says very few manufacturers specifiers and end-users understand or combine the quality concepts to result in an optimize product lifecycle. “The nett effect of the effective implementation of these concepts result in an optimal balance between cost and quality and leads to a way improved system whole life cost cycle,” he explains.

Condensing this largely unknown synergistic concept and distilling and presenting the essence was the role of Saravanan Babu, a plastics pipe testing and QMS specialist from Plasco Limited in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Babu shared his understanding of quality concepts and implementation challenges in a way that was easy to understand, as well as offered a number of useful ISO 31000 risk management guidelines, including:

• How to manage risks, make decisions, set and achieve objectives and improve performance
• How to handle external and internal factors that influence whether an organisation will achieve its objectives
• How organisations can use risk management to their advantage when it comes to setting strategy, achieving objectives and making informed decisions
• How effective governance and leadership contributes to the improvement of management systems
• How to effectively manage risk through interaction with all stake holders and with the help of detailed principles, frameworks and processes.

“The new ISO 9001:2015 has more freedom for interpretation and have less strict requirements compared to the previous version. Being a two-stage certification process, users have the opportunity to rectify, make corrections, and achieve certification. However, certification to this standard does not necessarily guarantee product compliance. It was therefore important for us to use this platform to address key issues and provide answers to areas where clear direction and clarification were needed,” Ian says.

SAPPMA’s 5th Quality Workshop will take place on Friday, 24 June 2021 starting at 09:00 via Zoom. George Diliyannis, Technical Service Leader and Subject Matter Expert for PE100 materials at Safripol (Pty) Ltd, will be presenting the the effect of contaminants on Polyethylene pressure pipe performance, with a specific focus on stress crack resistance. 

“The positive feedback we’ve been receiving from delegates after each of our workshops make it clear that they derive significant benefit from attending these technical, yet practical sessions.  These monthly, free-to-attend quality workshops are specifically targeted at thermoplastic pipe and fitting manufacturers / fabricators, regardless of whether they are SAPPMA and IFPA members or not. We also invite plumbing fraternity and its representatives merchants importers distributors, end-users, specifiers, consultants, main and sub-contractors, raw material producers and importers, certification bodies, testing houses, third party inspection bodies, auditors, researchers and subject matter experts, the media and other interested parties to join us. Recordings of these workshops are available via the SAPPMA website for delegates who registered, but were unable to attend, or who want to access the information after the workshop to refresh their memories or review the content,” Ian concludes.