Identification of Customer Property: Customer-Supplied Thumb Drives & Ext Hard Drives

[azuker]

Good afternoon,

Customers will sometimes supply computer files for us to use in the course of production. These files may be submitted to our CSRs on thumb drives or external hard drives. We also have "customer-owned" external drives in our prep area that also store customer-supplied files.

Currently, external hard drives and thumb drives submitted by customers to our CSRs are not marked, tagged or identified as such. They do, however travel in a "job bag" that is labeled with a job number and customer name. This job bag goes to our prep dept, who copies the files to our servers and then they in turn give the thumb drive or external hard drive back to the CSR to keep until the CSR returns them to the customer.

Is it necessary to actually apply some sort of removable sticker, tag or other means of identification on the thumb drives and external hard drives while they are in our possession? Also, would it be necessary to label any customer-owned external drives that are kept in the prep area?

Thanks!

 

[Jen Kirley]

Re: Identification of Customer Property: Customer-Supplied Thumb Drives & Ext Hard Dr

ideally there would be a way to identify these items, but a marking on the unit may not be appropriate. Can the bag carry identifying information? The standard's requirements are to "identify, verify, protect and safeguard customer property provided for use or incorporation into the product." If the items can be identified without physical markings in order to achieve the rest of the element's requirements, then markings are not required because the standard doesn't refer to markings/labels etc.