TS audit - finding related to old control plans

Hello,

We recently had a TS surveillance audit. The auditor found an old control plan that has been in use since before our company became TS certified. His finding was that the control plan did not meet all the requirements in "Annex A". These control plans were all part of PPAPs to Ford Motor Company, and all had been accepted with signed PSW's.

He said there is no grandfather clause and we'd have to update all the old control plans.

Is he correct?


Mike

 

Sucks to be you. I swear these guys go to some secret auditor pow wow -- "hey get them on Annex A."

While there is no grandfather clause, common sense would indicate that a document created, and approved, prior to implementation of TS would not need to be updated unless issues have been found in the process that an updated control plan would address. Otherwise, you could spend years updating old documents. What's the point. Did he give you any specific deficiencies?

Good luck. I have some left over Vodka from my audit I can send you.

 

Yes, everything was fine for that long. It's a very simple, stable metal stamping process.

 

Simple to fix that particular control plan...............not so simple to fix the scores of others. That's why I'm asking the group, can an auditor force a company to bring all pre-TS certified control plans up to the current standard. It will be a lot of extra work. Ours, like most companies, does not have the resources for this kind of busy work.

 

I don't know, I haven't been here long enough.

I'm still interested to know whether we have to retroactively bring old Pre-TS, customer accepted documents up to the current standard.

 

The fix may be simple, but don't forget you now have to go thru a full root cause analysis, corrective action, blah, blah, blah. What was wrong? My guess is something not consequential.

 

I can't speak for Mike or Golfman, but we would need to because our procedures states that we will do this for all NCs found during an audit.

 

If there has not been any change to the products and processes what is there to change? I think you need to show the antiquated date of the Ford Specification that matches the original date of the Control Plan and take this incompetent audit to the CB. Once again if you do not like the auditor contact the CB and ask to do a Customer Satisfaction Survey in addition to the appeal process.

 

You'll need to refer to the 4th edition of the IATF rules. They seem to require the whole shebang -- correction, root cause analysis, systemic corrective action, and verification of effectiveness.

 

There could be a lot of semantic/interpretation type issues, none of which will improve their process.

 

Why would you need to go backwards? I have parts in production prior to the invention of fire, let alone ISO and TS. We had control plans back in the 80s. What value was there by putting it on the "new form?" People with 100s of parts would take a year's worth of time if they did one every 2 days - a busywork nightmare.

That's why a common sense approach works -- making the control plan revision if something changes or a new PPAP is requested, or other need arises.

 

Activity which can be audited must be TS-compliant, irrespectively when it was performed.
Otherwise auditor would be forced to accept your explanation "We knew about this nonconformity from 8 years, but we did it in the past, now we do it properly."
It is still nonconformity and active nonconformity.
You are still supplying customer with products which were designed/developed/validated/approved without taking into account all applicable requirements.
Customer's approval of incomplete PPAP file does not release you from meeting all PPAP requirements.