Supplier Audits - What to Audit when a Supplier is not Certified

[roneljdsilva]

Well in my experience the suppliers do not necessarily need to be certified to a particular quality standard but must comply with the QMS requirements defined by your organization for its suppliers.
You can use an ISO supplier audit plan and audit them against that, or you could define the QMS required by ISO as a requirement for your suppliers. See how that works? But unless you are a bulk buyer I reckon you don't put such stringent requirements and only what seems important.
On a side note, there are tons of supplier audit samples online. Research a little and make a plan to what is deemed necessary for the supplier to have inorder to comply with your company's requirements.

I hope this helps.

 

[Sean Kelley]

Some of these answers are dependent on the nature of your audit.

We are TS16949 certified and are required to use suppliers that are ISO9001 certified but also demonstrate conformance to TS. As such it depends if the supplier is TS certified then I would look at key areas I want to make sure they are doing well. to me that would be how do they keep us from getting bad product, capability studies, and any problems we may have had directly from them.

If you are not mandated by TS or some other standard to make sure they confrom to certain requirements I would pick out the things most important to protect yourself from getting bad product. How do they measure / monitor critical aspects, when it is out what to they do - place it on hold, rework product, ship it anyways, etc. find out their actual practice and let them know if they ship it anyways that is not acceptable to your company.