J
Ofcourse,it is a bad one as per the management..
Why not to say "it is bad on it's own merits." rather than attributing the fact to what management considers it like. If something is bad, it is bad and will continue to be bad whether or not the management endorses it so. The status is largely based on the specifications we set for things to be 'good' or 'bad'.
'Good' and 'bad' have their own connotations - which is why, I think, the Standard talks about conformity/nonconformity. It's entirely possible to be fully conforming with a process/procedure... but with one which is not am efficient or effective process. Perhaps it's convoluted, maybe it's too bureaucratic, maybe it has too many excess (and wasted) steps or requirements in it, for example. Do you really want to argue that this is a Good Thing? The key point for me is as Andy said (my bolding added):
The auditor provided no evidence of the effect of not following the procedure. I don't mean that not following procedure is bad!
Quality a la 9001 is supposed to be about consistency, yes, but it's at least as important to remember the importance of Improvement and Enhancing Customer Satisfaction.
An audit must report more than 'they're not following procedure' and stop at that point. If that's all internal auditors do, as Audit/Quality Manager I'd look to improve internal audits so that management gets more useful information than that! I'd be irritated & frustrated if that's all I got back from audit reports: 'they're not following procedure'. Immediate next question: SO WHAT? Please, please, answer that question too. Without that piece of information, there is no reasonable conclusion to draw. And management would every right to complain that they're not getting value from their internal audits/system.
IF (it's a big if, and not necessarily applicable to this case) people vary a procedure because it's a poor one... that's a whole different thing to varying the procedure because it suits them, they didn't have, didn't feel like following it, etc etc. Please: give management better information. Which is it here?
