ASSOCIATIONS
19
New national auditor
system begins roll-out
The responsibility for the auditing of PIRB certificates of compliance was recently
passed to a team at IOPSA to handle the increasing number of submitted certificates
and eliminate any conflicts of interest that may arise when PIRB is both the sole
provider and auditor of the process.
By Warren Robertson
Brendan Reynolds, executive director of IOPSA, explains that in
addition to the ability to eliminate the PIRB as ‘judge, jury, and
executioner’, the move has meant that the service offered will
ultimately become more streamlined, efficient, and professional. while they complete their training. “Standard geyser installations for
instance — anyone with the right basic education will be able to take
the measurements, follow the laws, and explain whether or not a
geyser is correctly installed.”
“We have put a huge amount of work into this, and it has been a
long time coming,” says Reynolds, adding that the PIRB was happy to
handle the process while the volumes were quite small. IOPSA is currently advertising and placing recently qualified
engineering graduates and plumbers who hope to take up the
additional training to work as full-time auditors. “We have no doubt that
we are going to learn a few lessons over the next few months. This is
all a new experience for everyone involved, but our hope is that the
training courses, and the appointment of fully qualified auditors, will roll
out to scale with the increasing demand for audits. Within five years,
we hope to have a fully operational national system of auditors who are
backed by a recognised qualification, and who are managed in each
region by their own technical managers,” Reynolds says.
“The number of certificates sold has been ticking up quite dramatically,
however, and now we are currently looking at needing to audit 5% of
roughly 8 000 sold certificates a month,” he says.
This steady increase in submission of certificates clearly meant
that the PIRB system needed a dramatic overhaul if it was going to
cope with the increasing demand for auditors’ time, and that the
audits themselves would need to be done in an unbiased, fair, and
professional manner.
With that in mind, IOPSA has been appointed by the PIRB to set up a
new system, in which auditors will be sourced and trained before being
deployed to a region under a technical manager, who will act to use
auditors according to their level of training, as well as conduct more
complex audits themselves. Initially, this system will be supported by
the PIRB’s current system of auditors to ensure that the large volume
of necessary audits is being conducted, but the long-term plan is to
train enough independent auditors, hired on a full-time basis by IOPSA,
to conduct all the necessary checks without any additional assistance.
“If you ask me if we will be up and running at full capacity within the
next two to three months, I am going to tell you that it is not possible,”
explains Reynolds.
The plan is to launch the system across the country, to meet both
current and future demand. The slow initial speed of the roll-out is
principally due to the need to create a course to train independent
auditors, and then to ensure that enough people become qualified
through that course in each region.
“Some kinds of audits are not hard,” says Reynolds, who envisages
the new auditors initially heading only to simple audits with a checklist
www.plumbingafrica.co.za
At first, the system is going to be overseen by Steve Brown, IOPSA
national operations manager, who will also hold the role of technical
manager for KwaZulu-Natal. Steve van Zyl, IOPSA national technical
manager, will handle Gauteng, while the Western Cape, at the time of
writing, will be managed by the yet-to-be-appointed technical manager.
“As time passes, we will need to fill the roles of technical manager
in the other regions, as well as train enough auditors to cover those
places. It’s a massive job, but in the end, it’s all for the good of the
industry,” insists Reynolds.
The money for the training of auditors, as well as for the cost of the
audits themselves, is already built into the price of the certificates,
which are sold by the PIRB. The PIRB in turn pays IOPSA for each audit
conducted and provides the capital to train the new auditors. Reynolds
explains that in the long term, the plan is to put the system out to
tender for an entirely unconnected organisation to handle, but says that
by that time, there will hopefully be a system of qualified auditors that
the new company can contract to perform the audits.
“Our role as IOPSA is to grow and develop the industry, so while it
makes sense for us to pioneer these systems and get them up and
running, it doesn’t make sense for us to continue running them
indefinitely. At the end of the day, we must think of what will help and
strengthen plumbing in South Africa,” says Reynolds. PA
November 2018 Volume 24 I Number 9