Beginning this year, I had a meeting with IATF representatives to challenge this rule.. it didn't do much to us.. other than getting answers why they decided to create that rule. It looks like some companies were cheating, having different organizations/structures using the "extended workbench" as an excuse to have less auditor days. I understand that.. but for those cases, the auditor is the key, they have to notify that to DQS and open major NC's instead of changing the rules not considering other organizations that are not cheating.
The answers I got from IATF was to work with the registrar to get reductions using a mini corporate scheme... I mean, in your case, you will have 20% reduction for having 3 sites under the same organization. It's not a lot but at least is something (I actually suggested IATF to have a rule than in these cases, having up to 40% discount...it was just silence and then there was a comment regarding that the rules were already revised and will stay like that for long time).
Also, IATF suggested that another agreement between the organization and the registrar is, that having that mini-corporate scheme, the organization could decide how many auditor days would like to have by location. For instance, if the site extensions should have 2 auditor days each and the main location 6 auditor days.(total of 10 days) The organization could indicate the registrar to have only 1 days per site extension and 8 days for the main one.
Good luck!!
