Re: 5.4.1 Quality Objectives - Nonconformity:The process was not fully effective
This is a misinterpretation and misapplication of the requirement. The auditor made an error. The requirement is that Objectives which are defined must be COMMUNICATED to the relevant levels. That means if it is a maintenance objective, it must be communicated to and known by the relevant maintenance personnel, but not necessarily by the purchasing people, because it may not be relevant to them.
The clause in no way specifies what your objectives should be. It is useful to look up the clauses during an audit, to see what the actual wording is... You may want to discuss this finding with the CB. It is not appropriate in its current form.
PS: based on the objectives you do cite, there is probably room for improvement in this area of your system. But the finding as written may not be valid.
I'm not sure that I fully agree with the auditor in that I suspect there could have been more and perhaps should have been more.
I don't agree with Helmut's intrepretation either.
What the standard says is that quality objectives need to be established at relevant functions and levels within the organization. To me, establish is not a matter of employee knowledge and maintenance of that knowledge.
Back to the OP. What the certification bodies (and they are pushed by the accreditation bodies) are driving for today is developing KPI for each of your core processes. There is nothing to keep you from using any one KPI for more than one process or more than one KPI for any one process.
Guidance for what to use for quality objectives / KPI can be found in element 8.4 where you are told you need to do analysis of data to determine the health of your system, and goes on to give you four topics that must be covered with them; customer satisfaction, product quality, process conformity (often shown overall as on-time delivery), and supplier performance.
Go to your interaction of processes chart and determine what you say your core processes are, and line them up to the above KPI.
A typical example could be:
Management Process - Customer Satisfaction
Sales - Customer Satisfaction and On-time Delivery
Production Planning - Product Quality and On-time Delivery
Purchasing - Supplier Performance
Manufacturing - Product Quality
Quality - Product Quality
Shipping / Receiving / Warehouse - On-time Delivery
Of course, you need to set goals for each of those and your mix of core processes are likely to be different.
I have a plane to board or I would say more but best of luck.