Yes, Don, I do as well. I may not consider an internal document 'published' per se, but I would accept that.
BUT - I must admit I have not yet had a problem with shelf life issues. One client has material with a shelf life of 6 months designated by the manufacturer (adhesive) which that client keeps refrigerated and has extended the shelf life to about 1.5 years. They can show through warranty and other failure data that this is not a problem.
RRamamurthy wrote:
Sir, that may be typical in the US. here in India, it may vary from 45 C to 10 C, with humiduty from 40% to as high as 100%!
Most of my clients have materials storage indoors in a somewhat controlled environment (AC in summer, heat in winter). I have no idea what to tell you other than to talk with the quality manager of an ISO registered firm in India and see how they approached it.
You will, I predict, have to be quite aggressive here. If it was me, I would define every material which is time sensitive and write a document defining the company policy and directions for each. I would document the reason(s) for your 'classifications' and be ready to back that up with engineering, warranty and nonconformance data.
Obviously you are in an 'impossible' situation. I would get together with your registrar and go through the situation and your solution. Reality is reality. If they give you a problem and cite you (write a nonconformance) during an audit, appeal the write-up. There must be some other ISO registered companies in India which use time sensitive materials - find out which registrar one of them is using. And ask them how they handle their situation.
I'm sorry I personally cannot recommend anything else when:
...just throwing out recalcitrant supplier is not easy enough here, where we are still at a sellers' market stage in many products.
as I have not, with any of my clients, had a problem with shelf life. In fact, it is generally not an issue because material is typically used
well before shelf life becomes an issue.
An example is a former client which used a special paint which had a shelf life of 4 months. They used the paint within 2 to 3 weeks of receipt so the only issue was ensuring Materials Management folks strictly followed their First-In-First-Out (FIFO) system and that Receiving folks adequately checked lot dates and such.