How I Learned About Quality Management Standards: The Registration Audit Surprise! (Based On A True Story) By: Dave Taylor I was dead tired. It was Thursday, and I was on the CTA train from O'Hare to home after a loooong four day week in Little Rock. My phone rang. "Why don't you have the sense to shut it off after 5:00," I thought as I answered. "You'd better come in for the closing meeting tomorrow." It was Joan, the Management Representative of a company I'd been advising for seven months on how to get their company listed to ISO 9002. They were going through a four-day registration audit this week. She went on, "We have a major finding on corrective action; it has to do with verification. I can't talk now cuz I have to go with the auditor. See you tomorrow at 8:00." I walked in at 7:30, so I could get the skinny before the meeting. Seems the auditor checked three corrective action projects. None had verification steps completed, and, to make it worse, in all three cases the corrective action was not effective. The first was a special shipping instruction for a Canadian customer that had been identified as a problem and supposedly corrected. Upon review of the shipping dock, the new procedures were not being followed. The second was an added color check in the paint department that was not being carried out. Finally, the frequency check on a stamped steel product had been increased to reduce a defect. Once again, we didn't follow the new procedure. The auditor had serious doubts that the corrective action system was working. Joan and I did too. The meeting itself was anticlimactic except the company president was heaping scorn on all of us, including the auditor, who was only doing his job. "…How come you didn't find this in the preliminary audit!?!" A bad day all around. What went wrong? There were no corrective action findings in the preliminary audit because the system was too new to judge its effectiveness. The nonconformities were not found because it was too early for verification at the time of the preliminary audit. Though the key error was the management representative did not understand verification and although she had signed off on the verification stem, it had not physically occurred. This was my fault. The good news was the findings were corrected, other corrective (and preventive) actions were correctly verified, and two months later the company was registered ISO 9002. Other things to consider in a registration audit after a successful preliminary audit: •  Management review (has it kept up the defined schedule?) •  Vendor list (in the preliminary audit, almost all were grandfathered) •  Training (ditto…the grandfathering) •  Internal audits (schedule, audits complete, corrective actions taken) Dave Taylor President Kolimat, Inc. About the Author Dave Taylor is president of Kolimat, a company established in 1993 and dedicated to assisting small businesses to improve their quality and reduce their costs through improved manufacturing and quality systems. Dave is a Certified Quality Auditor, Certified Quality Engineer, and a Certified Six Sigma Black Belt. With over 25 years of manufacturing management experience, Dave successfully led companies' quality systems registration efforts (both ISO 9001 and QS-9000) and has developed basic quality systems. Dave recently spent 8 months consulting with a manufacturer on six sigma problem-solving projects. Comment on this article