Auditor days for ISO 9001:2008 "re"certification audits

M

Morgan Lefey

I am looking for an estimate of the number of auditor days required per site in the following situations. Honestly, I think our certification body is trying to get more money out of us than need be, esp. since they are really upping their marketing (they look pretty desperate to keep revenue: phone calls and emails more than what we saw in the dotcom bubble bursting). It looks like the recession is hitting them in the pocket book. It looks like it is hitting most CBs hard, but that is no reason to mess with the clients you have just because you know that they do not have copies of your general guidance. If I know what that basic guidance is, I can dicker with them.

I have three different sites ISO 9001:2000 certified transitioning to ISO 9001:2008 with their 3 year recertification audit in the fall. The neither our internal auditors nor CB auditors are easy- so, our systems are pretty clean, not cupcake and mature.

Site One: certified since 2000: 54 employees, no outstanding nonconformances, no customer issues, no nonconformances from the CB in 6 visits, CB visits are 6 months.
Site Two: certified since 2001: 73 employees, no outstanding nonconformances, no customer issues, no nonconformances from the CB in 4 visits, CB visits are 6 months.
Site One: certified since 2003: 170 employees, no outstanding nonconformances, no customer issues, no nonconformances from the CB ever, CB visits are 6 months.

Other options would be appreciated...
 

Colin

Quite Involved in Discussions
Re: Auditor days for ISO 901:2008 "re"certification audits

Welcome to the Cove. I will offer some thoughts but there others in the Cove that work for CB's direct so they will have a better handle on this than I do.

Generally, the CB's that I work with use the fairly 'blunt instrument' of the number of employees to determine how many days are required for each phase of the audit process. This then gets increased or decreased on factors such as which standard we are applying, complexity of the processes, geographical location, etc to establish the correct number of days.

Whatever the calculation, it has to be agreed by their AB and any variations from the plan have to be justified if they should be asked about it during their audits. Surveillance visits have to be conducted at least once/year and if there is more than 1 day/year they tend to do the visits twice/year.
 

Randy

Super Moderator
Here's the exact document your CB has to use for determining the days, you figure it out
 

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Sidney Vianna

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Leader
Admin
Site One: certified since 2000: 54 employees, no outstanding nonconformances, no customer issues, no nonconformances from the CB in 6 visits, CB visits are 6 months.
Site Two: certified since 2001: 73 employees, no outstanding nonconformances, no customer issues, no nonconformances from the CB in 4 visits, CB visits are 6 months.
Site One: certified since 2003: 170 employees, no outstanding nonconformances, no customer issues, no nonconformances from the CB ever, CB visits are 6 months.

Other options would be appreciated...
With no customer issues, no CB nonconformities, after so many visits, what is the driver to keep the certification going? Why 6-month interval visits if the system is mature and the CB does not report anything?
 
J

JaneB

With no customer issues, no CB nonconformities, after so many visits, what is the driver to keep the certification going? Why 6-month interval visits if the system is mature and the CB does not report anything?

Huh? Sidney, am I understanding you correctly? Are you suggesting that the key value in external certification is getting nonconformities reported?

I would hope that a good system is getting very few, if any, NCFs. And not waiting for external auditors to find their customer issues...
 

Sidney Vianna

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Leader
Admin
I would hope that a good system is getting very few, if any, NCFs. And not waiting for external auditors to find their customer issues...
So, why should a "good system" maintain certification, if there are no problems to be found by CB auditors?
 
S

Sam4Quality

I am looking for an estimate of the number of auditor days required per site in the following situations. Honestly, I think our certification body is trying to get more money out of us than need be, esp. since they are really upping their marketing (they look pretty desperate to keep revenue: phone calls and emails more than what we saw in the dotcom bubble bursting). It looks like the recession is hitting them in the pocket book. It looks like it is hitting most CBs hard, but that is no reason to mess with the clients you have just because you know that they do not have copies of your general guidance. If I know what that basic guidance is, I can dicker with them.

I have three different sites ISO 9001:2000 certified transitioning to ISO 9001:2008 with their 3 year recertification audit in the fall. The neither our internal auditors nor CB auditors are easy- so, our systems are pretty clean, not cupcake and mature.

Site One: certified since 2000: 54 employees, no outstanding nonconformances, no customer issues, no nonconformances from the CB in 6 visits, CB visits are 6 months.
Site Two: certified since 2001: 73 employees, no outstanding nonconformances, no customer issues, no nonconformances from the CB in 4 visits, CB visits are 6 months.
Site One: certified since 2003: 170 employees, no outstanding nonconformances, no customer issues, no nonconformances from the CB ever, CB visits are 6 months.

Other options would be appreciated...

Am I surprised? Enormously!

Frankly, I have never come across a company in my quality career with such ideal statistics. I don't really know how many quality practitioners agree to it but I find it somewhat unbelievable! And rightfully so, primarily because the quality culture deepyl varies country to country. So, maybe this is possible, a perfect or lets say close-to-perfect system! Just to bring me back to earth, I would like to know whats your company profile, if that is acceptable to you.

With no customer issues, no CB nonconformities, after so many visits, what is the driver to keep the certification going? Why 6-month interval visits if the system is mature and the CB does not report anything?

I would agree with Sidney here, especially on the 6-month CB visits. When Morgan's company's QMS is fully conforming (since the past 8 years!), why waste time and money on having 2 surveillances, one should suffice given that Internal Audits are being conducted on schedule and delivering no non-conformances. And I dont think, it is the CB's prerogative to decide that!
However, there might be possibilities of distributing the audit sites over a 12-month period. Site three during one surveillance and Site one and two during the second. That may be a possibility.

Ciao.
SAM:cool:

N.B: Can someone please tell me, how to add a signature to my posts, if that is allowed here. I tried going to my profile and wasted some good time without flying colors!
__________________________________________________________________________
To acheive the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought!!
 
M

Morgan Lefey

Thank you everyone for the help.

We are considering moving to 12 month audits after our recert. For what we do, it is generally better to have some one in twice a year for a day or day and a half at a time than to have them on-site for three days in a row.

The driver is a customer requirement. Ironically, our success has driven the customer to require ISO from all of its suppliers. Now, they are asking us to train the other suppliers as well since these others are still are not producing to the level of quality that the customer expects from us. Talk about a conflict of interest.

One of the reasons that this has been a topic of discussion in our company is that the number of days that the auditors have given us for the recertification audit has fluctuated greatly with each visit. The last visit, which was during the bleak winter months when a large number of businesses folded or withdrew their certs, they had added at least one day and in some cases 2 or three to the number of days we were initially told when our number of persons on staff had actually dropped.

Honestly, I have no idea how they are expecting to spend 5 days at our site with 70-ish employees. (We were initially told 3 days) Although the six month reviews are lighter, they normally can’t fill that day with auditing either.

Company profile. We make products to detailed specifications given to us by our single customer. Each site focuses on different products. Around 80% of the staff (staff here for 7-0 years) at each site was brought into the ISO business culture established by the other 20% (people here for 8-10 years) and basically groomed to it.

We started ISO at one site as an experiment for our customer. At that site: on 110 products per month, we went from 50% failure rate to a failure rate of 1 item per year after we completed our ISO build-out and started the certification audits. Our number of product delivered was changed to 450 5 years ago, and we get about 1 failure every 26 months. Normally, it is something considered non-critical by the customer. When we started producing 110 products, another company was producing 50. They too became ISO certified, but took a different path/made different choices than we did and our quality level forced them out of production on that product in less than two year’s time. Everything we learned on this task was transferred to the other sites and products. Lessons learned information is shared freely by all.

Anytime that work is taken from one of our competitors by the customer for quality issues or scheduling issues, the customer gives us that work. If the customer wants a rush project, they give us that work. The customer has also considered having us QC all of our competitors work. We just embraced quality and what we need to do to ensure it.
 

Randy

Super Moderator
5 days with 70 employess, for a surveillance visit?

I'm sorry, but if the information you supplied about past history is correct I'm gonna give a big steamin' Horse Bagels to that one:horse:

Maybe the CB of Dewey, Cheatum & Howe does that but it doesn't seem to be in like with accreditation requirements which would be about 5 days for a complete initial registration (Stage 1 & 2 combined) for a low risk organization.:nope:
 
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