We just finished a TS and ISO 9001 Audit and was informed by our Auditor, through an email from the CB, that during a witness audit (TS) it was identified that the 3rd Party Auditor did not note that the company's scopes should be rewritten to remove the word "Automotive" as it is redundant being that they are referring to the TS 16949 certification. Anyone else hear of this?
Now that our auditor showed us this Memo, he expects us to remove this word from our company scope as well. We are certified to TS 16949, ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 hence we have different scopes.
Is this necessary or just something specific to the CB. Not sure if I am allowed to state their name but I will and if it is against the Cove rules I am sure someone will Edit it out.
QMI - SAI Global.
Just seeing if anyone else saw this memo either directly or indirectly...
thanks


PS:
We received Zero NCs for the TS and ISO 9001 audit......:applause:

We just finished a TS and ISO 9001 Audit and was informed by our Auditor, through an email from the CB, that during a witness audit (TS) it was identified that the 3rd Party Auditor did not note that the company's scopes should be rewritten to remove the word "Automotive" as it is redundant being that they are referring to the TS 16949 certification. Anyone else hear of this?
Now that our auditor showed us this Memo, he expects us to remove this word from our company scope as well. We are certified to TS 16949, ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 hence we have different scopes.
Is this necessary or just something specific to the CB. Not sure if I am allowed to state their name but I will and if it is against the Cove rules I am sure someone will Edit it out.
QMI - SAI Global.
Just seeing if anyone else saw this memo either directly or indirectly...
thanks

PS:
We received Zero NCs for the TS and ISO 9001 audit......:applause:

Sharon,

Removing "automotive" from the scope statement????:mg: That's BS!
If you wish to include the word "automotive" in your scope statement, that should be your organization's choice.
Not everyone may know what ISO/TS 16949:2002 means.

What do my Fellow Covers think?

Stijloor.

TS, QS, BS?????

Sounds like it to me too, Jan, and I don't mean British Standards......:notme:

To be charitable (Who? Wes Bucey?!):
I suspect this is merely a communications glitch of an attempted Opportunity For Improvement (OFI) being poorly worded and even more poorly received.

Plainly, applying the old "show me the shall" criterion, the CB is treading on some foul-smelling air if the email reads as the OP suggests. I, however, have lived too long with Standards to be content with anecdotal evidence. What is the EXACT text of the message?

With the EXACT text, we can make a stronger determination of a preferred course of action.

Did everyone catch that it was the witness auditor that is driving this? Witness auditor, as in a witness from the accreditation body. Witness audits are performed randomly to see if the auditors for any given CB are up to snuff.

How do you go about contesting the findings of a witness auditor?

I had the understanding that the witness auditor could not interfere with the audit, and that his findings would be against the CB, not the auditee.

Someone please enlighten me, or was the witness auditor out of place?

TS, QS, BS?????

Sounds like it to me too, Jan, and I don't mean British Standards......:notme:

Alright Andy, let's call it Bullsh*t...:lol:

Jan.

Did everyone catch that it was the witness auditor that is driving this? Witness auditor, as in a witness from the accreditation body. Witness audits are performed randomly to see if the auditors for any given CB are up to snuff.

How do you go about contesting the findings of a witness auditor?

I had the understanding that the witness auditor could not interfere with the audit, and that his findings would be against the CB, not the auditee.

Someone please enlighten me, or was the witness auditor out of place?From the original post, it is not clear if the witnessed audit was the one that took place at his facility. But when I read the comment that triggered this thread, during a witness audit (I assume an IATF audit), the witnessing auditor made a comment to the CB auditor and the CB. So, and technically, s/he was not directly interfering with the CB audit. Please note that, during a witness audit, there are two audits taking place: The CB audit of the organization and the audit of the CB by a stakeholder.

While it is correct that the witnessing auditor should not directly affect the results of the CB audit, there should be an on-going communication between the witnessing and witnessed auditors. For more information, please peruse this paper: The witnessing of CRB audits by an accreditation body (http://isotc.iso.org/livelink/livelink/4299258/AAPG-WitnessingAudits.doc?func=doc.Fetch&nodeid=4299258) .

Concerning the issue at hand, another example of total waste of bits and bytes. As TS 16949 is an Automotive Standard, and eligibility for certification is limited to automotive manufacturing suppliers and products, it is redundant to have the word automotive in the scope of certification. But does it do any harm if we leave the word there? Total waste of time and energy, imho. If one peruses copies of TS 16949 certificates (http://images.google.com/images?ndsp=20&hl=en&q=16949+certificate&start=0&sa=N) available in the internet, you will see the word automotive used in many of the certificates.

I do not have the memo so I cannot give you the exact wording. He let us see this memo from his company, that was a result of a recent witness audit. It was not our auditor, nor us being audited. He showed us this memo prior to begining the audit and asked if we wanted to update our scope in light of this. We will, as it is just a minor thing and if it makes our lives easier when being audited we are all for it. He never made note of it in his report, we just agreed that we would change it prior to next audit.
I just wanted to hear if anyone else had heard of this.....

We would have to know more about the memo and its content to go much further with this.

Well I guess that would be up to any QMI auditors on here if they want to pass along this memo....:thanks:

I'm not surprised to hear this at all. The IAOB is very picky about what they allow in scope statements on certificates. They have been emphasizing to CB's over the last couple of years that they want the industry to "clean up" their scope statements. Removing the word "automotive" in scope statements is a practice I've seen for quite a while.

The IAOB's scrutiny also includes the names of "support functions" that can appear on the certificate. The CB that I do TS audits for actually has a list of acceptable support function names (blessed by the IAOB) that we must verify on certificates. I've been witnessed on two audits in the last 18 months, and know from personal experience how picky the witness auditors are...

If there is no published requirement for deleting the word "automotive," why is your organization doing that? If it is not in ISO/TS 16949:2002, the CSRs, or your internal requirements, why address it at all? Perhaps this mysterious memo alludes to something in the Third Edition of Rules, to be released sometime in the near future. If you did not remove the term, would the CB write a nonconformity and state that the memo was the requirement? Hopefully, we are not doing something just because the registrar likes to see a certain way. My bottom line is that if there is no requirement for it, the organization does not have to do it.

I made an inquiry about this topic through a CB I audit for, and here is the response I got back:
The requirement for what words are appropriate or inappropriate in a ISO/TS scope statement is not clearly documented. The only reference I have ever been able to find is in the Rules 2nd edition roll out training to CB’s (see the slide about Rules section 5.b) created by Tripp Martin (which was before I started here at IAOB). The slide states “no reference to sales, warehousing, sequencing, packaging, servicing, etc” should be included in the scope statements. The use of the term “automotive” or “in the automotive industry” is not stated in the roll out slides, but the comment could have been made verbally.

Michelle Maxwell
Manager - Witness Audit Program
International Automotive Oversight Bureau

I checked with my 'TS' Business Unit Manager, who's responsible for our automotive program and he said it's not specified anywhere that the wording of the scope should NOT include 'automotive'......

Thanks for the response all. I will let our Director of Quality know your input before a decision is made to remove the word "Automotive" from our scope. Like I said this was not an NC, OFI, or even noted at our audit... it was simply shown to us prior to the audit as a "just so you know............":cool: