CM-PE-711 Procedure for Vendor Quality System Requirements

Table of Contents

1. Purpose
2. General
3. Responsibilities
4. Procedure
5. Flowchart
6. References
7. Attachments

1. Purpose

The purpose of this procedure is to define the manner in which Company, within the framework of their own quality system certified to ISO 9001, shall:

• identify client requirements concerning Vendor quality systems;
• express these requirements within the Purchase Orders;
• assess a Vendor’s quality system to identify its strengths and weaknesses;
• take into account these strengths and weaknesses in placing the Purchase Order and in its subsequent management;
• monitor quality performance of the Vendor during the life of the Purchase Order;
• feed back that information into a Company Vendor data base (thus completing the loop and providing information for future projects).

2. General

The ultimate quality of a Company project is dependent on the quality of materials and equipment and their associated documentation furnished by Vendors with whom Purchase Orders have been placed. These include:

• supply Purchase Orders
• the supply element of a supply and erect Purchase Orders.

Quality cannot be “inspected in” by Company into Vendor supplied materials and equipment. Instead it must be obtained by placing Purchase Orders with Vendors possessing and operating appropriate systems to give the necessary “assurance” that specified “quality” has been attained. However, no Vendor’s quality system is perfect. So it is necessary that Company becomes aware of a Vendor’s strengths and weaknesses, so as to be able to act accordingly.

Finally, to enable future projects to benefit from the knowledge gained, information must be fed back into a Company data base for future reference.

3. Responsibilities

The flowchart in Section 5.0 shows the detailed involvement at each stage of four Company departments, namely:

• Engineering (Project);
• Inspection (within Procurement);
• Procurement (Project);
• Quality Assurance.

Section 4.0 below details responsibilities at each stage. However, these can be summed up as follows:

• Procurement is responsible for providing the structure to enable the whole procurement cycle to be performed and ensuring that, in collaboration with Quality Assurance,. requirements for quality assurance are defined and met;
• Engineering is responsible for identifying quality requirements and expressing them in specific technical terms in specifications, requisitions etc.;
• Inspection is responsible for ensuring that within the overall requirements, inspection needs identified by Engineering are translated into a coherent inspection programme and implemented by the Vendor.
• Quality Assurance has the specific task of assessing a Vendor’s quality system through a review of his Quality Manual and in addition helping the other Departments to ensure that quality assurance principles are followed throughout.

4. Procedure

4.1 Company Vendor Database

The Procurement Control System (PCS) holds data on known Vendors including:

• presence or absence of formal quality system
• supplier alerts and restrictions (from other Company offices)
• feedback on assessments made concerning Purchase Orders placed.

The system is updated particularly when the Purchase Order is closed out. See 4.6 below.

4.2 Project Quality Requirements

Every project is subjected by Company to a “contract review” in several stages, namely:

• enquiry evaluation
• proposal preparation
• contract evaluation
• resolution of differences
• amendment to contract

The purpose is to identify client requirements, make sure they are clearly expressed on the contract and accepted by both parties i.e. client and Company.

This operation includes special requirements concerning Vendors and quality requirements expected of them. Specifically, the following questions need to be answered, with responsibilities as indicated:

This stage is formally closed by Procurement ensuring that these requirements are incorporated into the Contract. See Reference 6.1.

From this starting point, requirements are to be translated into a form for transmission to the future Vendors for eventual inclusion in the Purchase Orders. For this, actions and responsibilities are as follows:

4.3 Bid processing

The whole supply and/or supply and erection of materials and equipment is broken down into a number of bid packages, each of which is potentially a future Purchase Order.

For each bid package a list of bidders is prepared. Actions and responsibilities for this are:

When bids are received, subsequent actions and responsibilities are as follows:

4.4 Purchase Order Placement

Subsequent actions needed to ensure requirements identified during the bid processing (see 4.3 above) are incorporated into the Purchase Order.

4.5 Purchase Order Quality Management

4.5 This is defined in detail elsewhere. See Reference 6.5. However, the various steps are outlined below:

4.6 Purchase Order Close-out and Feedback

Actions can be summed up as follows:

The loop is now closed and the information on the Vendor can be used on other projects.

5. Flowchart

6. References

7. Attachments

None.