Importance of choosing accredited service providers, products, services highlighted |17 June 2019

Vice-President Meriton addressing the gathering

The importance of choosing services and products from accredited sources was highlighted in a ceremony at of the Seychelles Bureau Standards at Providence on Friday morning during which the service provider opened the doors of its different laboratories to the public.

Vice-President Vincent Meriton under whose portfolio falls the Seychelles Bureau Standards (SBS) also attended the event to mark the World Accreditation Day which falls on June 9 but was not commemorated then as it was a Sunday.

Accreditation is the process of recognising an organisation for performing specific tasks – be it a conformity assessment service example testing, calibration, certification, inspection and the SBS is the conformity assessment body which provides all these different types of services.

This year it is under the theme ‘Adding Value to supply chains’ that the World Accreditation Day has been celebrated.

Supply chain is the sequence of processes involved in the production and distribution of a commodity.

Congratulating and commending the SBS staff for all their hard work to ensure quality and maintain standards, Vice President Meriton reminded them that good governance, one of President’s Danny Faure’s administration’s cornerstone is about having standards.

“Good governance is about having standards and this is what you are living and doing here every day. Little do we realise as we go about our daily lives that everything is about standards,” VP Meriton pointed out.

Mr Meriton went on to announce that next year Accreditation Day will be celebrated over a week whereby the SBS will come out to raise awareness of our population on the importance of accreditation, quality control and standardisation.

“It is important that people appreciate and know more about the work that you do,” VP Meriton stated.

He assured the employees of the government’s support and called on them to engage in more research and collaborations.

For her part, the deputy chief executive of SBS, Sreekala Nair, stressed on the importance of this year’s theme.

She noted that businesses nowadays look for the most cost effective ways to do business and their supplies come from different sources from different parts of the world but the risk is that it is difficult to ensure quality, safety, reliability of products and service they get from all these suppliers and providers, thus the importance to ensure they are dealing with accredited suppliers.

Accreditation ensures competence, integrity, and impartiality of an organisation and services and products provided by an accredited body are more credible and reliable.

“The success of a business depends on its supply chain and if the supply chain fails the business also will not succeed,” Ms Nair pointed out, noting that the theme is very relevant and fitting for the SBS.

SBS board chairman Bernard Monnaie for his part drew the audience’s attention to the many competing products and services available to choose from today.

“As consumers we are increasingly challenged to decide on which of them to buy. Accreditation helps us do so by enabling suppliers to provide assurance of the quality and authenticity of what they offer,” he pointed out.

“It also helps importers and border controllers to refuse entry to goods that do not live up to their claims. Important consequences of such entry refusals include financial and reputational costs to suppliers,” he emphasised.

Mr Monnaie is calling on organisations to take steps to add more value to their operations, products and services through accreditation.

“SBS is the only organisation in Seychelles with some accredited tests and you may seek our help for guidance on matters relating to accreditation,” he stated.

A parastatal body, the Seychelles Bureau of Standards was established in August 1987 under the Seychelles Bureau of Standard Act 1987 to provide standardisation in relation to commodities, processes and practices.

The SBS Act 1987 was subsequently repealed and replaced by SBS Act 2014 to make better provision for the development, promotion and maintenance of standardisation in industry and commerce. SBS has a workforce of 56 employees ranging from technicians, to scientists and engineers who work as a team in a systematic approach in order to offer a quality service to all customers.

Since its formation, SBS has striven to promote the concept of quality throughout the country by the development of various standard documents which are used as guidelines or even have become laws of Seychelles.

The organisation is registered to ISO 9001:2015 for the administration of: Laboratory Testing, Metrology, Product Certification, Development and implementation of standards, and Science and Technology information management and dissemination.