Our goal is that, despite Covid-19, our customers will continue to be able to carry out the operations that require certification in the field of fire and security. We therefore maintain a continuous dialogue with the standard issuers and others with responsibility linked to certification.
To ensure that the operations of certified customers are affected as little as possible, both Swedac, the Swedish Fire Protection Association and Stöldskyddsföreningen have drawn up different guidelines and decisions. For the Swedish Fire Protection Association and SSF standards, this means that we, as a certification body, are given the opportunity in various ways to ensure that our customers can maintain their certificates. For example, although the situation as a result of Covid-19 affects the possibility of conducting examinations and audits for the renewal (recertification) of certificates, we now have the opportunity to solve it in different ways while avoiding a situation that causes certificates to become invalid.
As the Public Health Agency believes that there is a general spread of infection in Stockholm and, for this reason, recommends a reduced number of trips within the country, we are adapting our operations in order to reduce the spread of infection.
Currently, the following applies to the various business areas of SBSC:
Product Certification
- The handling of certification cases is carried out as usual.
- Factory inspections abroad will not be carried out for the time being.
- Factory inspections in Sweden can be carried out following consultation with the customer.
Company and System Certification
- Scheduled company audits will be discussed with each customer and the decision to carry out or cancel an audit will be taken in consultation between SBSC and the customer. Cancelled audits will be primarily replaced by digital audits. Affected customers will receive instructions regarding digital audits.
Personal Certification
- To ensure that distances can be kept in the exam room, we currently offer a limited number of participants per examination. We follow the development of the pandemic closely and make continuous assessments of the suitability of conducting examinations in groups and want to flag that examinations may be canceled at short notice.
- As a result of fewer available examination places, due to Covid-19, we have decided to extend certain certificates for one year from the regular expiry date. This extension only applies to certificates with recertification between 2020-10-01 to 2021-04-30. During the extension of these certificates, we will carry out an extra annual inspection. A license fee is charged for the time your certificate is valid. We hope that the situation develops in a way that means that, during this extension, you will have good conditions to complete your recertification before the certificate’s validity period expires.
We believe it is vitally important to reduce the risk of infection, and therefore urge both employees and customers to follow the guidelines developed by the Public Health Agency: do not leave home if you feel sick and wash your hands frequently and carefully.
As the situation can quickly change, we are prepared to take further action on short notice. In such case, we will post the information here on the website, on LinkedIn and also notify our customers via direct e-mail.
