M
mischele68
Hello everybody 
. I've been viewing posts here on the Cove for a while now, but have not yet seen any posts related to the situation I currently find myself in. I have been employed at an AS9100-approved manufacturing facility for quite a few years; my responsibilities have included Document Control and Internal Auditing functions for the majority of that time. Over the years, I have seen several Quality Managers / Management Representatives come and go. Each one had a different mindset about this, that or the other regarding the QMS and made changes based on that mindset. (Resulting in total 
for me!) Our most recent representative appears to have placed the responsibility for supporting external audits squarely on himself, i.e. SME's are not interviewed by the customers, he is providing all answers to questions, etc. Today I discovered that during the course of our last customer audit, a spreadsheet with links to objective evidence that it was felt the auditor may be looking for was created. Not a problem, I thought it was a novel idea. What I have taken issue to, perhaps incorrectly, is the fact that during the creation of this spreadsheet, controlled documents were copied from the master file location to a secondary location instead of linking them directly from the master. Nothing is marked as reference material as far as I can tell...my question to you who are CB auditors is: can the duplicate copies of QMS documents (which may or may not be updated in case of revision) be considered an noncompliance (Control of Documents) should they be discovered in a future registrar audit? Sadly, as far as I can determine, we are one of those companies whose management views the QMS as a necessary evil instead of good business practice (No management review in almost 3 yrs). 
. I've been viewing posts here on the Cove for a while now, but have not yet seen any posts related to the situation I currently find myself in. I have been employed at an AS9100-approved manufacturing facility for quite a few years; my responsibilities have included Document Control and Internal Auditing functions for the majority of that time. Over the years, I have seen several Quality Managers / Management Representatives come and go. Each one had a different mindset about this, that or the other regarding the QMS and made changes based on that mindset. (Resulting in total for me!) Our most recent representative appears to have placed the responsibility for supporting external audits squarely on himself, i.e. SME's are not interviewed by the customers, he is providing all answers to questions, etc. Today I discovered that during the course of our last customer audit, a spreadsheet with links to objective evidence that it was felt the auditor may be looking for was created. Not a problem, I thought it was a novel idea. What I have taken issue to, perhaps incorrectly, is the fact that during the creation of this spreadsheet, controlled documents were copied from the master file location to a secondary location instead of linking them directly from the master. Nothing is marked as reference material as far as I can tell...my question to you who are CB auditors is: can the duplicate copies of QMS documents (which may or may not be updated in case of revision) be considered an noncompliance (Control of Documents) should they be discovered in a future registrar audit? Sadly, as far as I can determine, we are one of those companies whose management views the QMS as a necessary evil instead of good business practice (No management review in almost 3 yrs). 
