posted 04 October 1998 08:48 AM               

1a. Do these documents on equipment - not parts.

1b. Process sheets are not control plans. There is a control plan forma with certain columns required. Their purpose is problem solving in nature whereas process sheets are process oriented. You can distill some items from your process documentation and in fact there should be links such as inspections and tests. Your control plan defines them and they are then (typically) included on process documentation.

2. They're the same document - you define the document by it's status at any given position in a timeline (by date). Often all three look the same anyway.

posted 09 November 1998 09:13 AM               

I dont know if I am confusing the issue, but here goes:

Are you QS certified? If you are you should have control plans for each product of family of products, if they are sold to automotive customers or customers who subscribe to QS-9000. For example we sell several different products. Each product is pretty much made by the same process. Therefore the control plan is almost the same for each product. Once we created one the rest were easy.

Now each product can be made to a different thickness. We did not create control plans for each thickness. Technically the product is different since our customers use it for different applications. But since only thing that changes is the thickness, we call this a "family" of products. It is QS compliant to have one control plan for a family of products if your customers says so.

As far as all the documentation you currently have to control the process, I believe we have something similar. We have detailed operating procedures, set-up checklists, data forms etc... BUT they do not meet the control plan requirement. On the other hand our control plans do not replace all the detailed documentation. They work together. We reference the detailed docuemntation in the the control plan.

posted 10 November 1998 02:28 PM               

How do you go about setting up a product family if specs are required on the control plan? We have many parts, many specs all going through similar processing and control points. Can we define all these parts as a family and reference the specs in an appendix?