How should we document individual Support Processes

[gspec312]

Hi all,

I have recently been asked to transition the company from the 2008 to 2015 9001 standard. As a background we are a small manufacturing company, with 4 management and around 26 other personnel. We believe the processes in our 2008 manual are far too great to be owned and measurable with such a small management team, so have reduced these to 4 core processes of Business Development, Purchasing, Production and Shipping. For each of these we have created a process definition document, analysed risks with this and have KPI's set.

We are wondering how we should be documenting the individual support processes, should these be done in the same way. For instance, we have accounting, maintenance, inspection, document and data control etc listed under support processes. Do we have to create a process definition document as per the core processes for each individual support process, including owner, KPIs, risk analysis. The previous manual which had been drawn up by a previous employee, had a flow map for each of the processes and then only had a documented procedure for each. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[bigqman]

The standard does require documented information associated with "support" clauses 7.1.5 monitoring and measuring resources, and 7.2 competence. Your process definition document with analysed risks and KPI's are a form - but not the only form - that such documented information could take. Maybe you only need to identify, document, and monitor the support outputs. (We have a training matrix on a spreadsheet that serves that purpose, for example) The degree of helpful documentation of the support processes should be proportionate to the risk/criticality associated with each support process in your business system. Hope this helps - Congrats on the core process work!