This Month You Are Assigned to Conduct the AS9100 Rev. C Semi-Annual Surveillance Audit

Case Study

The Company

This month you are assigned to conduct the AS9100 Rev. C semi-annual surveillance audit at XYZ Metal, Inc. XYZ is a distributor of metals in various forms: plate, sheet, bar and coil. They mainly supply to the aerospace and automotive industries.

·  Their corporate HQ and a service center are located in Detroit, MI (62 employees) – considered one location

·  There are three other service centers: Columbus, OH (22 employees), Dallas, TX (15 employees) and Tacoma, WA (29 employees).

Permissible exclusions to XYZ Metal Corp’s aerospace quality management system include 7.3 (no product design) and 7.5.1.5 (no servicing or repair to supplied product). Heat treating is outsourced to three NADCAP certified entities.

XYZ has been certified to AS9100 since 2002. They transitioned to Rev. C at their recertification audit in January 2011. At this first semi-annual audit, Detroit and Columbus are being audited.

Pre-Audit Planning Information

Prior to arriving on-site, your certification body provides you with the following pre-audit data to facilitate your planning:

·  quality manual (an excerpt is provided here)

·  score card from ABC Aviation and customer complaint summary

·  copy of ABC Aviation’s customer-specific requirements

·  management review and internal audit records

·  recertification audit report

From your review of the previous recertification audit report, you see that there were two major and thirteen minor nonconformities across the corporate scheme: one major related to project management, one major related to risk management, three minors relating to the corrective action process, two minors on supplier management and eight more findings relating to other processes. A revisit was conducted and all corrective actions were verified before the revision C certificate was issued.

Internal audits are conducted on a quarterly basis, one site per quarter, so each site gets audited one per year. There are internal auditors at each site, and the schedule has auditors from one site auditing another to ensure independence is maintained. The internal audit schedule is synchronized with your CB’s audit schedule. Thus, Detroit and Columbus were audited in Q1 2011 and Q2 2011, respectively. There were zero findings at the 2011 internal audits.

From your review of the management review minutes, you note the following:

·  They have had an increasing number of customer returns, especially at the Columbus site. Disciplined problem solving was initiated and the root cause stemmed from use of new heat treat supplier in Dayton, OH that was not used previously.

·  Delivery performance failed to meet the 100% target at all locations. (See attached scorecard).

·  There has been an increase in internal scrap.

·  Dallas has received three corrective action requests from ABC Aviation in the past two months for failure to transmit Advance Shipment Notifications (ASNs). In Tacoma, there was a corrective action request for two skids exceeding the maximum weight.

·  Their five-year-record of no-recordable incidents has been broken. At the Tacoma facility, a worker tripped on debris on the floor and broke his arm in February 2011. He has since returned to work.