AS9120B flow down to external providers: Records Retention

[qualitygEEk]

Specific to distributors who stock and may have that stock for an extended period - this is not related to distributors who go out & find something then ship or drop ship immediately. What kind of language are you using to flow down requirements to external providers for Records Retention in compliance to AS9120B? Do you reject customer requirements that exceed your records retention flow-down?

HYPOTHETICAL EXAMPLE: Customer says" I want XYZ part." You have had it in stock for ages. You have had it for 12 years in your warehouse & you are going to be slightly happy to get rid of it. Customer PO has a 10 year record retention period. When you bought XYZ part, you had a 7 year retention period which was flowed down to the manufacturer where you acquired it. Your vendor purges their records regularly so their records on this material were destroyed 3 years earlier. What do you do? Do you reject the Customer's 10 year retention requirement? Reject the PO because you cannot comply?

Thanks!

 

[Sidney Vianna]

What do you do?

Have you ensured the records were discarded? Just because the minimum record retention of 7 years has passed by, it does not mean necessarily the supplier has discarded the records; further in this day and age of the digitalization journey, the records might have been scanned and are available in bits and bytes somewhere in the digital world.

 

[qualitygEEk]

It's a hypothetical case but that is a great point.