Certifying a "virtual" company with zero employees

[DarisS]

Hello,
I have an issue with understanding how I can certify a "virtual" company. Let's try to explain the scenario. I'm working on a company that is ISO 9001 and 13485 certified. Let's call it company "A". For fiscal and financial reasons, our board created a new company - let's call it Company B. That company has no employees but is used by employees from company A to somehow dispatch customer wanting high volumes of our company A products to a fast track and low cost solution through company B. That means that some of the employees of company A are invoicing their time to company B to execute the basic processes such as sales, customer service, procurement, etc. The product being then manufactured by a vendor qualified by company A.
The issue is that the customer ordering to company B is requiring that company B to be ISO 9001 and ISO 13485 certified. But as company B has no employees how is that possible to certify it???
Any idea?
Thanks

 

[John Broomfield]

Daris,

Zero employee Company B is part of Company A’s management system is it not?

If so, update the management system’s scope statement to include the work assigned to Company B.

Then bring the updated scope statement to the attention of your accredited registrar.

Best wishes,

John

 

[DarisS]

Hello John,
Administratively they are two different entities, means different names and different company numbers.
But function and process wise they are sharing the same departments and persons. Like sitting at your office and working for two different companies during the week but using the same quality system.
Your idea of just updating the scope plus describing how it works may be the solution.
I'll try that.
Thanks
Best Regards,
Daris

 

[John Broomfield]

Daris,

Don’t forget to update your internal auditing to include this change in scope.

John

 

[Sidney Vianna]

Any idea?

In the past, I have seen virtual organizations like this one listed in the same certificate as the real, bricks and mortar one. Yes, you can have more than one company in the same certificate. You can also have a DBA (Doing Business As) designation in the certificate. Talk to your CB. If they are minimally knowledgeable and 17021-1 has not been drastically changed, it is doable.

 

[DarisS]

Hello Sidney,
Thanks for the input.
The funny thing is that I posted the question on the forum BECAUSE my CB said "no way" of certifying such company. So thanks to the Elsmar community I'm seeing a solution that would let me have it certified.

 

[Cari Spears]

In the past, I have seen virtual organizations like this one listed in the same certificate as the real, bricks and mortar one. Yes, you can have more than one company in the same certificate. You can also have a DBA (Doing Business As) designation in the certificate. Talk to your CB. If they are minimally knowledgeable and 17021-1 has not been drastically changed, it is doable.

We've just recently split off our design and engineering group into it's own DBA designation. They are part of our current management system and follow all of our procedures, but they have a different name. This isn't an exact example, there are people - it's not virtual, but sort of the same.

 

[Al Rosen]

Hello Sidney,
Thanks for the input.
The funny thing is that I posted the question on the forum BECAUSE my CB said "no way" of certifying such company. So thanks to the Elsmar community I'm seeing a solution that would let me have it certified.

Now that you've found a way, your CB will probably try to do a re-certification audit.

 

[Kronos147]

I don't get how it can have zero employees. Who chairs management review meetings? Who does internal audits? Who develops strategy, policy, objectives? Who reviews and reacts and continually improves the system?

I can see somehow it has .01 effective number of employees. That would get rounded to one, I would imagine, for the purpose of assessment duration.

 

[DarisS]

No one is doing any audits, management review, policy, etc, as there are no employees, no organisation...
There is only an Executive Board that has no direct organizational relationship with the company. I mean the board members are not the company employees..
Whenever that company need to execute a task, it will use "external" resources. I guess we have to consider the company as an administrative broker or a kind of trading agency or something similar but still with no physical employees. That company will use "shared services" from other companies.
Somehow, company A will sell products and perform all the admin tasks using the name of company B and recording all the transaction under the name of company B. Then company A will invoice the admin tasks and the products to company B. At the end the customer get's the same products and services than company A but from company B...
Why doing so? Because customer want a competitive price and volumes that we can not propose through our company A, otherwise all customers would argue to get the same price. That's why we created company B. Offering commercial option but with different risks mitigation. Therefore T&C's are different in company B.
As proposed on one of the post, I guess the solution is to describe the above on the quality manual of company A and add company B on the scope.