EN/AS 9100 - Subcontractor audit and auditor requirements

Hello,
I wonder if you can help me with your opinion or experience on the following:

Recently I had a discussion with a quality manager whose company is in the 9100-approval process (design and manufacture). The discussion was about two main topics:

Topic 1:
A 9100-approved company audits their subcontractors: Is this a first or second party audit?

Topic 2:
Is there a requirement for a special education for auditors who audit their suppliers or is a general internal auditing training sufficent?


EN ISO 19001:2002, 3 terms and definitions includes two notes on internal and external audits:

Note 1: Internal audits, sometimes called first-party audits, are conducted by, or on behalf of, the organiszation itself for management review and other internal purposes, and may form the basis for an organization's self-declaration of conformity.........

Note 2: External audits include those generally termed second- and third party audits. Second-party audits are conducted by parties having an interest in the organization, such as customers, or by other persons on their behalf..............

In my opinion, any audit performed by the organization itself - no matter, if internal or with their subcontractors - is a first party audit and may be performed by a person who has undergone an internal auditor training.

A second party audit would be an audit that my customer performs in my company.

What do you think?

Thanks a lot for any reply!
Angelika

Re: EN/AS 9100 - subcontractor's audit

A 1st party audit is performed within the organization to assess the management system.

A 2nd party audit is performed on a supplier, either by the customer or a contracted auditor. This means audits your company does on your suppliers, as well as audits done on you by companies you supply.

A 3rd party audit is done by an outside party with no ties - registration audits, audits done by regulators, etc.

2nd party auditors aren't required to have certain skills, but it would be nice if they could be trained to collect objective evidence and ask leading questions without unnerving the supplier. One benefit of having a technical expert do a 2nd party audit instead of yours truly is that he or she would have special knowledge about what is being looked at. With them, specific technical or product concerns could be more intelligently addressed, while my strength is in overall management systems.

Ideally the audit could be done as a team. If you have rapport with the technical expert, a qualified auditor could tag along and help make sure the right types of examples are being looked at when drawing conclusions, among other things.

Re: EN/AS 9100 - subcontractor's audit

Angelika said:

Topic 1:
A 9100-approved company audits their subcontractors: Is this a first or second party audit?

Click to expand...

Definitely 2nd party.

Angelika said:

Topic 2:
Is there a requirement for a special education for auditors who audit their suppliers or is a general internal auditing training sufficent?

Click to expand...

The organization conducting the audit decides what the requirements for auditor competency are. Clause 6.2 of EN/AS9100 applies. Many organizations use internal auditor training for supplier auditors. The focus should be on achieving the desired results from the audits. Whatever training will get the desired results is what you want.

Re: EN/AS 9100 - subcontractor's audit

Angelika said:

Is there a requirement for a special education for auditors who audit their suppliers or is a general internal auditing training sufficent?

Click to expand...

Most of the "do's and dont's" of auditing apply to any type of system audits, but supplier audits should obviously be conducted with the existing knowledge of the supplier performance as a valuable input to the audit planning. For example, if you know that, based on past history, a supplier you use has had problems with their product marking, use that to plan your audit and focus/zoom on the parts of the product realization processes that affect product marking.

Most supplier auditors that I know don't have the level of knowledge of management systems and standards, as compared to third-party auditors. On the other hand, supplier auditors have access to supplier performance data that most 3rd party auditors don't have. The key thing, in my opinion, in order to make a supplier audit meaningful and value added, is to use the knowledge you have about the supplier and also be constructive in your approach. It is very easy for a supplier audit to turn into a confrontational and adversarial situation. A 2nd party auditor should be able to diffuse defensiveness and animosity. And they should also have the mind-set that the audit is an opportunity for both organizations to improve their products, processes and systems.

A supplier audit provides a chance for the ISO 9000 principle of mutually beneficial supplier relationships to come to fruition. Use it wisely. Don't waste it, turning into a nit-picking, meaningless, "gotcha", finger pointing, I-win-you-lose proposition.

Hope my experience helps.
Usually an AS9100 approved company perform supplier audit on suppliers / sub-contractors that are not capable to the level of AS9100; at most they are ISO9001.
In order to educate them to a minimum level of AS9100 for the kind of product or service that you need, I will ask them to draft a quality plan to meet our minimal AS9100 requirements. Asking a small business supplier to follow AS9100 standard is not convenient.
QS audit and/or product audit is then performed depend on the frequency of review you want to impose base on your approval of this quality plan.
Also if you have too many such suppliers the level of supplier audit you may want to impose subsequently can be LAR, commodity types, questionnaires, visits and audits.

Thank you to all of you for setting me on the right track.

Do you know that - sometimes you form a view on sth. and can't source it?

Once again