Quality Management – Common AS9100 Manuals for Large Corporations

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Small and medium size businesses with a single location that utilize AS9100 QMS have developed solid models for the top level documentation. At the same time, information on quality manuals for multi-facility companies was not addressed in professional publications. This publication proposes a model of a quality manual for establishing the top-level documentation structure that allows a business with more than one site to use common AS9100 quality management system manual.

Through my work as a Lead Auditor with major registrars, I observed dozens of large multi-location companies struggling with connecting their corporate AS9100 quality manuals with the supporting, location-specific, procedures. To develop a quality manual for a company with numerous facilities, organizations take two routes. Some organizations create site-specific quality manuals as copies of the corporate manual; others create site-specific AS9100 quality manuals that are entirely different from the corporate manual.

In the first case, when a site-specific quality manual is a copy of the corporate AS9100 manual with modifications specific to a given site, mechanisms to keep these documents coordinated are rarely defined. Difficulties of keeping these documents in sync are due to the fact that corporate quality manuals are controlled by the home office, while local quality manuals are responsibility of site’s documentation control departments.

The 2nd approach, when companies choose their sites to establish their own quality manuals, differences in all those quality manuals lead to noticeable disconnect between the corporate and site-specific quality manuals.

Those companies that adhere to the policy of maintaining a consistent corporate message regarding their position on quality will definitely experience a gap if they use methods that we discussed above.

Summarizing my consulting experience, I am convinced that these approaches to design of the corporate quality manual and sites’ manuals do not provide a solid consistent way to document organization’s AS9100 quality management systems.

Fortunately, there is a solution. Let us review an example of AS9100 2008 quality manual model that references supporting procedures. Our quality manual references supporting documents within the text of the manual. For example, element 4.2.1, Documentation requirements, general, may read: Your Company, Inc.’s QMS documentation includes: documented statements of the quality policy per the Quality Policy and quality objectives per the Key Performance Indicator Matrix (KPIM),

This model proved to be effective for a single-location company. This approach will also work for a multi-site business, but only for common documents that are used at all locations. For example, such procedures as Management Review, Internal Audit, Corrective and Preventive Action, and others may be the same for your all facilities and therefore be referenced in the quality manual as shown above.

While references to common procedures in an AS9100 quality manual are clear, we still have to address those documents that are specific to particular locations such as incoming inspection, organizational charts, product verification and others. When we wish to maintain just one quality manual, we need to reference in it supporting procedures for all sites which may easily clutter the manual. To solve this problem we will examine how a common quality manual can efficiently reference facility-specific procedures to address statements of the organization’s AS9100 quality manual.

As with a single-location company, a business still can use the same reference structure if the number of locations or sites is small; let us say not to exceed three. For example, element 8.5.1 Continual improvement, may read: Fast Air Company has established and maintains documented procedures to continually improve its QMS through the use of its Quality Policy, Quality objectives per the Quality Objectives Matrix HO and the Quality Objectives Matrix BA … This example references the common Quality Policy and site-specific Quality Objectives Matrix HO for the Home Office and Quality Objectives Matrix BA for the Buenos Ares plant. This model serves well quality management systems with limited number of facilities, but it becomes ineffective when the number of company’s locations increases.

For organizations with a large number of sites, where we need to reference numerous documents in the manual, including those controlled by satellite locations, we have another option. We can establish a document to connect corporate quality manual clauses with the site-specific supporting documents. Let’s name this document a Manual Reference Matrix and consider the following document reference structure.

Corporate AS9100 Quality Manual element

Manual Reference Matrix Table of Contents (ToC)

Site-specific Manual Reference Matrix

Location-specific procedure

The Manual Reference Matrix is simply a list of all facilities and their Manual Reference Matrixes, as shown below:

Manual Reference Matrix Table of Contents

Corporate Office (Tempe, FL USA)

Montreal, (Canada)

Berlin (Germany)

Irving, TX USA

… etc,

Let’s see how this model works. We will document element 8.4, Analysis of data: Our Company, LLP has established and maintains documented Management Review Procedure and site-specific data analysis procedures per the Manual Reference Matrix ToC to determine, collect and analyze appropriate data to determine the suitability and effectiveness of the Quality Management System to evaluate areas where continual improvements of the effectiveness of the AS9100 QMS can be made… This element states that the company uses common Management Review Procedure and site-specific data analysis procedures. To locate a site-specific data analysis procedure, we simply need to consult the Manual Reference Matrix ToC.

Finding the location in the Matrix ToC and locating, let’s say, St. Petersburg’s Matrix, we will identify a site-specific Manual Reference Matrix. Locating a specific element in the location’s Manual Reference Matrix, we will find a particular, location-specific procedure title that addresses our clause.

Our experience shows that a Manual Reference Matrix works well as a 3-column form with the 1st column titled Corp. Manual section, the 2nd column: Corp. References and the 3rd column called Site References. For the element 6.2.1, for example, the St. Petersburg’s Matrix indicates that manual references Training Procedure HO for the Home Office and the Training Procedure PR for the Puerto Rico site.

For more details on this topic and examples of the Manual Reference Matrix for AS9100 quality management system manual, follow the links below.

If you are developing an AS9100 Quality Manual for a large corporation and do not want to reinvent the wheel, check our AS 9100 Manual Reference Matrix. If you need help with implementation of your Corporate Manual, check our AS9100 Quality Management consulting services and documentation sets.

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