posted 11 July 1999 01:19 AM               

From: Dennis Arter
Subject:RE: Product and Process Audits /../Arter

Heather El-Homsi wrote:
>
>I would be very interested in participating in the endeavor you
>mentioned -USA standards for management audits & product/process
>audits.
>
>How can list members link into this effort?
>

Within the USA, quality management standards are developed by one of two committees: The Z1 committee and the ASQ Standards committee. Both are accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). To become accredited, both must develop and implement processes to achieve "consensus" in the standards writing process. At all stages in that development process, we put the proposals out for formal voting and comments.

Consensus does not give one person veto power over the work of the entire committee. It requires that everyone's vote be received and addressed. If the person is not pleased with the resolution, they have rights of appeal. This is one of the reasons why standards take so much time to get published.

Members of this list (and others) may participate up front in the writing efforts. At no charge. But they must contribute to remain on the writing committees. Or they can participate at the back end, when potential standards are circulated to the public for comment.

Since I don't even know if I have the backing of a "critical mass" of auditing experts yet, I don't know how this is going to shake out. I agreed to work with Charlie Robinson (former chair of the ASQ Quality Audit Division) to develop a position paper and present it to the Division members for reaction. I hope to have that done by August. Then we shall see.

If this project moves forward, one of the first steps would be to gather "experts" together for a writing group. Through the power of the internet, I feel we should not have difficulty letting folks know if and when the project has started. Stay tuned...

>Also, if needed (and I get their okay), I can think of a couple of
>companies that seem to have good processes in place for different
>types of audits that we might be able to pull in as references as
>well.
>

If you have contacts with *proven* ways of performing process audits (remember, the term hasn't even been defined yet!), I would be pleased to consider them as possible paper presenters for the 9th annual quality audit conference next March in Reno. But I need the 1/2 page abstract by the end of June - latest! The call for papers is posted on http://www.asq.org/qad.

* * * * * * *

Also, Danielle Kenyon wrote:

>Dennis Arter wrote about proposed new USA standards for auditing
>product/process and management. I wonder if this wouldn't be a
>logical next initiative for ISO TC176 (I think it's 176??)

Nope. IMHO, the international crowd is too focused on third party registration. Perhaps this is where they should be spending their energy. There are absolutely huge forces around this planet to bring sense to the current practice of issuing certificates of conformance to ISO 9001 or 9002. Throw in environmental management system registrations to the ISO 14000 series and you have big bucks and lots of activity. We have two major ISO technical committees involved: TC 176 (quality) and TC 207 (environment) There are other ISO technical committees, dealing with aerospace and medical devices and software, involved. The current efforts to revise the ISO 10011 and 14010 auditing standards are struggling with big issues world-wide. Most of that energy now is focusing on third-party applications of compliance auditing. Let's support those efforts.

But let's also see if we can develop something here in the USA to address the other five forms of the audit.