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How to Improve Your Next COR Audit With Verified Credentials

November 28, 2021

The COR certification shows that your organization has met the provincial OHS standards. When it comes time to obtain or renew your Certificate of Recognition (COR) status, your Health and Safety team is either confident in compiling the requirements or dreads the yearly collection process and crosses their fingers that they have the most accurate safety information. If you’re of the finger crossing group, read on for how one electrical contracting firm went from a time-intensive process, to quick and confident.  

Why COR Certify?

Before your organization can gain a COR status, you must have a health and safety management system in place or this process can take over 12 months to finish. This COR status is a highly sought-after designation that is recognized across Canada, allowing you to showcase your dedication to protecting the well-being of your crew while furthering the corporate value of safety across your organization.Benefits of the COR status involve:

  • Proactive workplace health and safety culture
  • Reducing the risks and costs associated with workplace incidents
  • Lowering WCB rates and qualifying for WCB Partnerships in Injury Reduction (PIR) Refunds and,
  • Improving the overall efficiency at your work site.

Verified Training With Digital Credentials

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Verified Credentials help to create a smoother auditing process by incorporating advanced, compliant technology into your health and safety management system.Did you know? According to the Government of Alberta, to pass the COR audit, you must score at least 80% overall, with a minimum score of 50% in each of the audit elements.

Preparing for an External Audit: Then vs. Now

Preparing for an audit is exhaustive and includes the verification of your workforce’s training certifications. It requires the need to double-check you have the information from all locations and systems such as HR or your health and safety management solution, and the records are current. Sometimes different site managers have various files of updated training information about their workers, and that now has to be consolidated and validated manually.Imagine if you could do this in less than 60 seconds?  Credivera is a secure digital credential platform that creates proof of records. This compliance solution allows our customers to manage, store, and showcase an individual's certifications upon request, eliminating all doubt about who is on the job site, and if they are certified to be there. From start to finish, verified credentials can support your next COR audit through preparation, documentation, and timeliness of the entire process.Using a verified credential solution that instantly provides you the ability to access site and training records 24/7 and share it when requested by regulatory bodies instills confidence.We turned to Credivera customer, CEL Electric to discuss their easy auditing process this year. For over 40 years, CEL has been providing fully integrated electrical contracting services for industrial, agricultural, and commercial facilities.  CEL's National Safety Manager, Davide Careddu, reported that Credivera's credential solution improved his trust in the auditing process and it took very little time to learn the system. “In 15 minutes, I got it figured out.”  He further stated that knowing ahead of time all the certificates and related data were correctly displayed in one application, and he wasn’t relying on separate sources such as spreadsheets, helped make this process very simple.

"The way Credivera is designed makes it super easy. It's a lot easier to see it and share it."

During the COR audit, Credivera’s secure platform built on private blockchain allows an auditor to see the records of compliance for any project or location and a trail of when each certification was updated. Since blockchain is tamper-proof, this increases the reliability of the data they are seeing.

Training Credentials for COR Audit

Specifically helpful during element 4 of the audit, the training portion, the auditor will have access to all information surrounding their credentials such as:

  • When your team members were issued a certificate
  • Who issued their certificates
  • When their certificate expires

“The auditor had zero questions when reviewing the credentials or how the system worked," shared Careddu. “I gave temporary access using the secure link to the auditor for the Calgary and Camrose location. She was able to verify when the training was done, the time the training occurred, and when the certification was up for renewal. It made it very easy for that specific section.”Additionally, rather than displaying a limited amount of information by a spreadsheet, Credivera provides a live URL of the digital credential, a representation of the certificate tied directly to the training provider, allowing the auditor to visualize the proof of compliance. “On a spreadsheet, you can see the name, date taken, and date expired, but with Credivera you can actually open up the ticket, and there's the date and a secure, valid view,” said Careddu.

Just do it. It makes life easier...the system is fantastic.

-Davide Careddu, CEL Electric

From preparing for an audit, sharing and receiving your results, verified digital credentials are changing the way COR audits are done with an improved speed, security, and delivery of training certifications.

To learn more about Credivera's Credential Wallet for managing your training and compliance requirements before and after your next COR Audit, reach out for a demo.

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