Help settle a disagreement: Should external providers of preventive maintenance be on your ASL?

JDB510

Registered
I (Quality Manager) and our Supply Chain Manager have a difference of opinion. We maintain a log with all of our systems/equipment that are on a preventive maintenance program. I recently discovered that a few external providers we use to conduct this maintenance are not on our ASL. My thought is that the quality and dependability of these providers should be monitored (and thus they should be subject to our supplier review and approval process) since they have an indirect impact on our ability to consistently meet customer requirements. He thinks this is overkill, and that they should be treated no differently than our janitorial service or the guy who delivers the water jugs.

Here are the types of items I'm talking about, I'm looking at 7.1.3 Infrastructure and 8.5.1p in the standard to support my position, maybe there are others?:

Air compressor (vital for day to day production activities)
Fire suppression system (vital for safety)
Forklift (no forklift, no moving heavy items from one end of the facility to the other, potential impact to production and on-time delivery)
Microscope (used in R&D activities to analyze part quality)

I feel like this is a no brainer, but I don't want to be completely unreasonable if he has a point, and now I'm really questioning my logic.

Thank you in advance!
 

JDB510

Registered
=Now, ask yourself. If you want these providers to be in your ASL, how exactly you will monitor them?

Thank you for that thread and your response.

Our current process of monitoring suppliers is by tracking supplier quality and on-time delivery. If we had something go wrong with a piece of equipment and were able to attribute it to poor/incomplete maintenance, we would write an internal NCR, and this would count against the provider's quality. If we scheduled maintenance and the provider did not come when scheduled, this would count against their on-time delivery. We have an existing framework to monitor them, just not a consensus on whether they should be monitored or not.

Now I really think I am overthinking this!
 

Sidney Vianna

Post Responsibly
Leader
Admin
Now I really think I am overthinking this!
Like most decisions, it should be risk-based (thinking). And, it seems, you already monitor some of them, to a certain extent. The question then becomes: how formalized this process should be?
 

Big Jim

Admin
If you feel that you should control those suppliers then you should. As to if it is required by the standard, take another look at 8,4,1 a-c.
 

Ed Panek

QA RA Small Med Dev Company
Leader
Super Moderator
From a risk-based perspective, one could argue that monitoring too many suppliers could irritate everyone and could negatively impact internal communication and quality commitment. How's that for a loop? I would argue that unless it could directly impact the product or customer requirements to take a hard look at where to stop.
 
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