It’s time to consider the processes involved in delivery of your product or service.
“Woohoo! we have the customer order – let’s start work!”
STOP.
Before you start work you need to review your current status:
If you are happy that you can meet all customer needs, then you can hit the button and START WORK!
Some smaller organisations use only the customer order to follow the job through the production or service operations. Other companies choose to raise separate Job Orders / Job Sheets or rely on MRP generated documentation.
When do you need to check / measure / test products or verify your processes?
Verification activities can be broken down into the following categories:
Inspection and Test Plans may need to be written to provide details of:
What do you do when things go wrong?
A documented procedure is required by the standard.
Explain how your organisation intends to define “minor” and “major” non-conformance.
Why is this important?
Incidents of “minor” and “major” non-conformance are usually treated differently. While we may need to monitor the frequency of occurrence of “minor” non-conformance and identify trending (increasing or decreasing frequency) we do not generally need to take any remedial corrective action.
All incidents of “major” non-conformance, on the other hand, will need to be subject to the corrective / preventive action process.
You need to determine how you intend to identify and how you will process “minor” and “major” non-conformances.
Consider the need to segregate defective products
Who is responsible for identifying incidents of non-conformance?
How will you identify defective processes or services?
How will you record and analyse non-conformance?
Maintenance activities need to be planned and scheduled for all plant and equipment used for production or service purposes.
We suggest you record the following data for each asset:
Record all routine and preventive maintenance activities in a Maintenance Log. Keep records of downtime and costs to enable you to judge if an asset is still viable – should you keep repairing it or would it be more economical to buy a replacment unit?
Calibration is the comparison of a piece of test or measuring equipment to a known standard.
Calibration of testing and measurement equipment is required for all equipment used to verify that the product conforms to the requirements.
Testing and measuring or monitoring equipment can be used for:
Some items of test and measuring equipment may be used for all three of the above applications.