ISO 9002certification for process and quality management. All new acquisitions such as wineries in Argentina, Spain and New Zealand will be certified to ISO 9002. We are now moving towards the new certification ISO 9000-2000. This new system works better because it obliges the company to aim for improvements to reach pre-established goals and objectives.

Two years ago we started the development of our Environment Management System, and have now achieved certification ISO 14001at 28 sites globally. This represents more than 80% of our production volume. Many of our operations were the first of their national industries to get certification e.g. Cockburn’s, Domecq Jerez, Domecq Segovia and Laphroaig.

For Health and Safety we are now following the new OHSAS 18001 recommendations. The programme started recently and so far two of our production sites, Walkerville and Fort Smith, in Canada and the US, have achieved certification together with our UK National Marketing and Sales Company. We plan to extend this to our other locations in the near future. Using these recognised systems we have created a natural framework for managing production, quality, environment and health and safety in a co-ordinated manner.

Our operators can identify common problems and their solutions more easily through these complementary systems. We have also found that they open up improved communication between our technical employees.

	All of our major sites now have

The results showed real progress coming from improved practices implemented in response to the weaknesses identified the first time. We were delighted that three of our sites (Pedro Domecq at Jerez, DYC at Segovia, Courvoisier at Jarnac) achieved ‘world class’ status. We intend to use these sites as our benchmarks and share their best practice experience across the company.