I currently am dealing with the task of revising our company's sampling plans in the interest of providing effective quality auditing for the bulk manufacturing of millions of parts / day.
Our quality is almost solely based on visual/attribute data and I was wondering if there is a current "best" method to use for determining sample size, and percentage acceptable. Any suggestions?
qdigest 5/5/2001
There are several companies that have obtained single certificates of registration to ISO 9001:1994, TL 9000, ISO 14001 and QS-9000 covering multiple facilities in several countries around the world. Since I am not sure which standard your company is seeking registration to, I can only indicate how multi-site registrations can be handled.
The best example involves IBM, which at one point had more than 100 certificates of registration to ISO 9001 and ISO 9002 for approximately 28 facilities worldwide. Obviously, several individual production lines in some manufacturing facilities had their own quality systems and certificates. Several years ago, IBM concluded that having so many registrations for its facilities was not only inefficient from a quality and business standpoint, but it was expensive to have some many certificates and multiple surveillance audits and the related registrar expenses. IBM revised its quality system so that a single system covered all its manufacturing and some other facilities and then evaluated the registrars it was using to conduct its registration audits and chose one to conduct an assessment of the quality system for the entire organization, issuing one certificate of registration to ISO 9001:1994.
Ford Motor has done likewise by registering all its manufacturing facilities worldwide under a single ISO 14001 certificate.
The problem you will find in seeking information on global registration from many registrars is the fact that many are not global registrars. Many registrars have offices and auditors in a single country or on a single continent, and they do not have the capacity to conduct audits in countries where the language, business culture and regulations are unknown to their auditors. There are a few registrars that have offices in and accreditations from several regions of the world and have affiliations with registrars in other locations where they do not have the ability to conduct a valid audit.
Your best bet is to check out a registrar directory, such as the one that I believe is located on this web site, and see where a registrar has offices and from which accreditation bodies it has accreditation. These two things will tell you which registrars are prepared to offer global services.
As for the economic standpoint, your company may decide to obtain several certificates of registration for different parts of the world and using a different registrar in each part. The reason is economics: if a single registrar is going to have to fly auditors all over the world to conduct on-site audits of your facilities because its auditors are all from North America, for instance, it is going to cost a fortune for your company.