Re: Quick one - Are customer requests for alteration to product corrective actions?
Marc Elsmar, if you are reading this you need a "thank all" button so one can thank everyone on the thread!
This is where I get lost with all of this QMS stuff, ive gotta say.
Is the corrective & preventive action component suppose to be about the QMS business management system processes or the processes used to develop the outputs of the business?
Can I roll out some examples and you tell me whether they are corrective actions or not:
1. A customer contacts us because the product we provide them doesn't contain information THEY require and it has caused a problem for them and downstream even though we never previously knew of the requirement to produce this information (btw in my context a "customer" works for the same organisation...our section is individually certified..we are all working for the same output though)
2. Evidence of product conformity (records) is not being manged per the documented Records Management procedure, though it has never caused a problem!
3. There are no style/format guidelines in place for developing a certain type of document (product) that we output, however, nobody who recieves the document has ever complained about the format of it because the content is what they are concerned with as long as it is readable.
4. People have modified and created their own version of a template, however, again the customer doesn't have any issues with that as long as the content is correct
5. The KPIs related to the QMS quality objectives are not actually being checked.
Now to give you an insight as to where I am coming from...the guy that did my job before me walked around with a ruler measuring the margins on the documents (products) we output.
The customer never had an issue with the fact there was some variance from document to document. What they wanted to be standard was the content of the document. If a schedule request was met in a certain way one week, they wanted it to be met the same way the next time. They dont care about logos, font sizes etc.
This guy walked around measuring things, despite the fact that there was no stnadards in place for how to arrive at the output...eg what is the process for renegotiating when a customer request cant be met, who are the people that need to review the "draft" versions of the scheduling documents (products) we output, why do some people get a hard copy of the product but not recieve fax notification of alterations etc etc. He willingly it would seem ignored all of the process inefficiences and chose to focus on the secondary things...in my view they come later.
To me the value of this whole thing is this. If there is a problem, I can register it, assign it to an owner, develop and action plan, track that action plan all the way until it is completed...reporting to management weekly on the status of each thing.
We have managed to bring in some major changes to the processes that have had huge benefits...the reality is though I have been re-engineering the processes, not the actual process owners due to a number of reasons.
Am I totally out of the ballpark here?
This example I am giving you...the reason I want to log it and make an action plan for it is so that it happens. Otherwise, it will get sent to the process owner to fix on an email and it won't happen.
Am I using this framework the wrong way here? It seems to be of benefit the way I have been using it, but who knows what an external auditor will say because I am not walking around with a ruler looking at pagemargins I am trying to fix and standardise the actual processes!