Yancoal Australia Limited

Yancoal Australia Limited was incorporated in Australia in November 2004, to acquire coal assets and apply the Longwall Top Coal Caving technology, developed by Yanzhou Coal Mining, to the Australian coal mining industry. Yancoal is a subsidiary of Yanzhou Coal Mining Company Limited and will be listed on the Australian Securities Exchange during 2012. Yanzhou Coal Mining is listed in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and New York.

The company currently (February 2012) operates six mines, two development projects, and coal terminals in Newcastle and Gladstone.

In 2010 Yancoal began a period of rapid growth and significant transformation from a set of independently operated mines to an integrated corporate entity. At that time, the company had almost no corporate policies, procedures, or systems other than for financial reporting. To enable this growth and transformation, the company needed to design and document its business systems, and to articulate its governance frameworks, policies, and procedures.

In addition to the obvious need to achieve good management, the company must also meet a complex set of formal requirements —

• As a company incorporated and operating in Australia, the company must meet Australian statutory requirements.
• As a significant subsidiary of an entity listed in the US, the company must meet Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.
• As a subsidiary of a Chinese entity, the company must meet Chinese prudential requirements.
• To be listed in Australia, the company must meet Australian Securities Exchange requirements.

Kesteven Management Documentation was chosen for the purpose, to provide a single, integrated method for developing, communicating, maintaining, and controlling the company’s documented management system.

Over the course of 18 months, company personnel — supported by Kesteven consultants — have used the system to define and document their governance frameworks, policies, procedures and position descriptions. The company now has a robust and comprehensive management system, that provides personnel at all locations with the information they need to work effectively, and that meets the full range of statutory and commercial requirements.The system passed its first Sarbanes-Oxley audit in December 2011.

 

When I started in this role in 2010, what the company needed were policies, procedures, and governance frameworks. We didn’t have them; now we do. Kesteven Management Documentation has given us all that in a single, integrated system. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in 30 years of management.

Murray Bailey, Managing Director, Yancoal Australia Limited

Joint Accreditation System of Australia and New Zealand

The Joint Accreditation System of Australia and New Zealand (JAS-ANZ) is the government-appointed accreditation body for Australia and New Zealand responsible for providing accreditation of conformity assessment bodies in the fields of certification and inspection. Accreditation by JAS-ANZ demonstrates the competence and independence of these conformity assessment bodies.

JAS-ANZ accredits 97 conformity assessment bodies who in turn certify some 70,000 organisations. It offers accreditation for these programmes —

• Management systems certification such as quality management systems (AS/NZS ISO 9001), environmental management systems (AS/NZS ISO 14001) and others
• Product certification such as Codemark, Watermark and others
• Personnel certification
• Inspection
• Greenhouse Gas validation and verification

For each programme, JAS-ANZ has a complex set of documentation: the formal definition of the programme itself, policies and guidelines governing interpretation, competency requirements for the assessment bodies and their auditors, and in many cases, charters, policies, and working papers for the technical committees for the development and maintenance of the programme.

The content of this documentation is JAS-ANZ’s core intellectual property. The effectiveness of the organisation ultimately depends on the ease and efficiency with which it can manage, utilise, and add value to this content.

Kesteven Management Documentation was chosen as the tool for the job. The project had these objectives —

1. To bring order to the organisation’s intellectual property, not as a library of documents but as an inventory of information, arranged by purpose and content type.

2. To establish a definitive source of truth about the organisation’s programmes and activities.

3. To eliminate duplication, so the documentation for any one program or activity can be assembled as a combination of shared and unique elements.

4. To enable remote, collaborative access for programme teams.

Accreditation is all about risk management. As an organisation we had reached the point where the complexity of information, and the duplication, was becoming a risk in itself. This system made it easy to bring it all under control. It’s very flexible and conceptually very powerful: you can organise things the way you think about them, you can experiment. It’s also fun to use, which I wasn’t expecting.

Dr James Galloway, CEO, Joint Accreditation System of Australia and New Zealand