Top management and his representative?

Is true that the management representative still can exist?, because ISO 9001 says that the top management shall "assign the responsability and authority for", so top management can assign a representative.

 

You can have a management rep, that's not for ISO to say. You just don't HAVE to have one now for ISO.

 

Of course you can still have a management representative but not to be delegated to implement the QMS. You can have many management representative making sure that their processes are effective. The big change is that TOP MANAGEMENT (not the management representative) takes accountability for the effectiveness of the QMS. Simply stated: TOP MANAGEMENT can no longer "pawn" the responsibility of ISO to the management representative- TOP MANAGEMENT has to have a HANDS-ON approach in the QMS.

 

Define hands on? How involved must they be?

 

Top Management is accountable for the effectiveness of the QMS. They need to make sure that their contract objectives to their stakeholders are met. And if not, they should implement some kind of mitigation. I have audited Management Review where Top Management are not even there.

 

It won't be easy to make top management be accountable for the effectiveness of the QMS. I think they'll continue with the same attitude what they do in the past

 

If the 2015 version is the very first version of the ISO 9001 standard, I believe Top Management will appoint/assign a focal person who will be tasked to establish a QMS certifiable to the standard. Assigning somebody to perform tasks is part of the role of the TM. That's why we have managers for various departments/business units.

 

I am very interested to see how this plays out...will the auditors really hold top management accountable? Will the require them to be involved in the audits?
How will they define "top management? Our highest level of management is Japanese...and they have never been involved in any of our ISO audits...