As the leading supplier of industrial, food, medical and special gases in the UK, as well as associated equipment and services, we aim to ensure the highest levels of quality in everything we do.
BOC aims to continuously improve the quality of its products, services and customer experience. At the same time we strive to maintain a high level of safety and environmental protection.
For these reasons we have introduced an Integrated Management System covering all elements of Quality, Safety, Health and Environmental processes and procedures in order to provide effective and efficient control of all our business activities. As part of a global group of companies, the same systems are in use throughout the Linde Gas Group worldwide, and their deployment helps us to achieve our SHEQ policy.
The Integrated Management System has been developed to ensure compliance with all legal, contracted and elected SHEQ management system elements including the Quality Management System standard ISO9001:2015.
BOC's Quality Management System is audited by Bureau Veritas allowing us to confirm the robustness of our systems. A multi-site certificate against the ISO 9001 standard covers our gas manufacturing, packaging and distribution activities as well as our front line Customer Service Centres.
Gases used in the food industry for consumption (e.g. beverage carbonation), packaging (e.g. bread/meat etc) and ripening (e.g. controlled atmospheres for fruit and vegetables) have to be approved under EU law and are given E numbers. The EU also sets minimum purity criteria. All of these requirements (and more from other organisations) are contained within the Integrated Management System.
To ensure that where medical gases are manufactured and supplied for patient use, the principles of Good manufacturing Practice (GMP) specified in the EC Directive 2003/94/EC laying down the Principles and Guidelines of Good Manufacturing Practice for Human Medicines have also been incorporated into the Integrated Management System.
Our Special Products range of gases includes those used for high purity, instrumentation and calibration applications which require certificates of analysis. We also provide a range of products accredited by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) to ISO 17025 'General Requirements for the Competence of Testing and Calibration Laboratories'.
As part of this, BOC provides an extensive range of accredited gas calibration mixtures to facilitate environmental measurements, analysis of natural gas and petrochemicals, evidential breath-analyser calibrations and exhaust emissions measurements.
BOC is the first commercial gases company in the UK to be accredited by UKAS to ISO Guide 34: 2000 'General Requirements for the Competence of Reference Material Producers' as a Reference Material Producer.
Accreditation as both a Reference Material Producer for gases and as a Calibration Laboratory ensures that a consistent and technically robust approach is taken to the production and certification of gas calibration mixtures, including the comparability of measurements and certification data.
All aspects of the process, from contract review through preparation, analysis and certification, are covered. This allows us to provide our customers with a high-quality product which meets both current and future needs.
We also have a large range of gas mixtures which are directly traceable to national standards, and medical mixtures licensed for sale by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).