Making sense of system scopes

Today a long standing client got in touch asking for my thoughts on a scoping issue.??He was concerned as to whether or not an organisation outwith the bounds of the certificated body could or should be included in the management system.??It was an interesting question and as he explained more of the issues I took stock and, as usual for me, thought about the standard and what it requires us to do.

The first step was to really clear understand the relationships and inter-dependencies.??This started out process of clarification and was fundamental to the discussions which followed.??We needed to understand who the interested parties (4.2) are and how the organisation’s context (4.1) related to the situation.??Once we’d established who was responsible for what (5.3) we could start to move forward.

The organisation employs someone who is permanently based in a key supplier’s premises undertaking inspection and despatch duties.??It was clear that the supplier and arrangements for dealing with them would be covered by the organisation’s activities to meet clause 8.4 and once we’d established that the whole jigsaw puzzle started to fall into place.??The organisation has robust processes in place for the evaluation and re-evaluation of their supply chain partners and these are being deployed effectively so that was another aspect ‘sorted’.????The organisation understood the risks and opportunities (6.1) which came from a long standing relationship with this key supplier.

And so we moved on, establishing that the key role of the outbased member of the organisation’s staff was to undertake final inspection and agree that the goods could be released (8.6), and to ensure that in despatching them they were protected from harm (8.5.4).??The individual clearly needed to be competent (7.2) to undertake the tasks and also needed to ensure that appropriate documented information of the activity was retained (7.5) to enable the organisation to evaluate the performance (9.1) of the supplier and to identify any issues (10.2) and to drive forward improvement (10.3).

These sorts of scoping issues always appear complex at first glance but by going back to the standard and its requirements we can make the issues much clearer.??My thanks to Mike for posing this very interesting question!