Please provide your input to the following question dealing with document control QMS ISO 9001:2000

Should documents that were approved with the name of an authorized person that left the company be re-approved with a new manager's name? Or it is not necessary. Comment please.
Thanks.

Please provide your input to the following question dealing with document control QMS ISO 9001:2000

Should documents that were approved with the name of an authorized person that left the company be re-approved with a new manager's name? Or it is not necessary. Comment please.
Thanks.

I see no need too.... unless a change to that document becomes necessary for some reason... ex : change of authority, or changes in the process etc...

I have SOP that are dated in 1999 and signed by people that are no longer with our organization. Since then there has been no reason for an update, so they continue being the approvers...

Do you approve by job title or employee name?

I see no reason to re-approve, but a new person really should look at documentation he is responsible for approving to make sure he does agree with it.

Can you expand on "change of authority" if you please...

Can you expand on "change of authority" if you please...

Change of authority = the previous approver of the document left. The new guy has different (more or less) authority in some part of the process being described in the SOP... requires a revision in the SOP

hope that clarified things...

We approve documents by employee name.

We approve documents by employee name.

Change the procedure! Make the approvals by function (not 'department')

I'm with Andy here, which is why I asked the question. Just like I never put names in my org chart, when I define responsibility for anything, including approval of documentation, I use job titles/job functions.

A duly authorized approver should be acting as an "agent" of the company or organization...that is, he or she is legally authorized to take certain actions on its behalf. Thus, when an approver has approved something within the scope of their authority, the company or organization has approved it.

That approval is an event...not a continuing process. Thus a subsequent change in status of the approver is irrelevant to the validity of the approvals granted by the approver, as long as he or she factually held the appropriate authority at the time of approval.

Agency is a well-defined legal concept at the core of business and contract law.

Thanks! MIREGMGR, well explained answer to the original question. It would be very useful if many of the questions that are presented in the COVE were answered in this legal manner, simply because it adds a legal dimension to the question and supports a decision to be taken on the issue.

Thanks

Something else you may want to consider....

Have a controlled document that lists 'signature designees'.

Meaning, people that may sign in place of the person specified.
DO NOT list by the person's name, but by job title/position.

In my particular case, we list those who are lateral or downward from the signer on the organization chart, who are authorized to sign for that person.
We also explain that persons upward on the organization chart have explicit signature authority.

This may not work well for some...but for us it has been accepted and successful.
As always, your results may vary...as they say.

About 3 years ago we had someone come in here at a management from one of our foreign facilities. He wanted me to go back through all the documents approved by the previous manager, and replace with his name. i got him to agree to d it whenever a document of that type was revised or updated.
Then he made me bring them to him so he could personally sign his name on the document. Fortunately he went back home at the end of 2008.:)

Please provide your input to the following question dealing with document control QMS ISO 9001:2000

Should documents that were approved with the name of an authorized person that left the company be re-approved with a new manager's name?

Kind of makes it sound like the reason the last person left was because he was an idiot, and his work could not be trusted. I doubt that was the intent of the standard. What the standard wanted to ensure was that the person responsible (and, one might easily assume "at the time"), was aware of the change and agreed to it.

Period. Controlled. Thank you...and good day. :cool:

Now, in the training section, one might want to see if the new authorized person was aware of the procedures they are responsible for. That might be fair game.... :tg:

Something else you may want to consider....

Have a controlled document that lists 'signature designees'.

Meaning, people that may sign in place of the person specified.
DO NOT list by the person's name, but by job title/position.


YES!!! :agree1:

I have always done that - in fact for small companies I used "generic positions", such as Production Leader. Today, that person might be the VP of Operations....tomorrow, Production Manager. All I had to do was maintain a cross-reference, as the responsibilities of the of the employees shifted...as in "wearing many hats"...:cool:

As a side point, my perspective is that any approval system--"agency" based or otherwise--requires a dated, verifiable chain of records as to who had what approval authority at what time, and by what grantor-action that authority was granted.

Without such a chain of records, it can become very difficult several years after the fact to prove that Person X did in fact have duly granted authority to approve something.