VENDOR AUDIT (VA).
VENDOR AUDITING RATIONALE.The vendor audit (VA) sprung to life in the aircraft industry, in the late 1950’s, when it became very apparent that you could not just build an aircraft, and then certify it, fit to fly, just by inspecting it, quality had to be built into every manufactured part and every manual operation. Opinions were out, documented, company approved instructions, were in. Quality Management was born, not an event - a process, and a mindset. Years later the same problem became apparent to the medical regulators, and cGMP appeared. The inspection and assessment of quality became extremely important, and assessing your suppliers became mandatory. Documents like IQ,- OQ, - DQ, - PQ,- VRA,- VP, - URS, were born. Just completed a supplier assessment, how important was your documentation? How important was your justification for your decision? Have you been biased in your judgement? Were your priorities right? How did you get it so wrong? These are questions that are in the minds of all persons affected by an adverse audit outcome. To make certain that you are going to be ‘squeaky clean’, every question, and every answer and observation, needs to be clearly documented. The company priorities must be understood and integrated into the weighting of the audit documents. If you are auditing on behalf of a client, they have a right to review your assessment documents.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ANALYSIS.The step-by-step, systematic approach used in this audit document, makes it easy to complete the Kepner Tregoe analysis. It can be very useful where there are many potential options to consider as well as many possible unwanted effects. Built into it is the ability to minimize some of these negative effects. Although it is offered as an unbiased decision matrix, somebody has to decide the relative importance of the various aspects of the audit, the probability of occurrence of adverse reactions and the relative significance of each of these reactions. It's difficult to believe that there won't be any bias in there whatsoever! Kepner Tregoe decision making sets up an outcome as well as how exactly it should be achieved. This is often problematic because the universe often has other plans! You can have one or the other, not usually both. VENDOR AUDITING SCOPE.An quality assessment questionnaire must cover the under listed topics but it must use a method of weighting the topics in order that the really critical topics have a more significant impact on the quality assessment outcome.
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