Identification of Quality Records (ISO9001 - 4.2.4) - How?

Hi, Lea and welcome to the Cove! While I am not Carol, I hope you do not mind me attempting to help you out.

I suggest you do a search in the Cove using the 'search function' located towards the top of the screen. Do a search for "document control" or "record control" and a lot will come up.

cheimmie23 said:

Would youm ine giving a sample copy of your document control proceures for i will be revising some procedures here and i have difficulty to do this... if you can be of help... thank you.

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If Carol or another Cove member shares their procedure with you, that's great, but it does not truly help you, Lea. What one company does will not necessarily work at your company.

I am curious, though, why are you having difficulty doing this for your own company?

Identification of records

we have identified the records in our QMS as follows
record identification is unique no. such as
YY/DC/R-XX

YY Stands for Company Name
DC Stands for Departmental Code
R-XX Stands for Record No.

if media is important you can accomodate in DC like Production, QA etc,

vinay

My customer's supplier quality requirements only states one item to be retained for a period of eleven (11) years, Material Certs. But then further into the procedure it states,copies of records shall be maintained for the life of the document or eleven (11) years or as specified by contract or regulatory authority.
Now how in the heck and I supposed to tell the management of my company how long they are to retain all their documents. I gave them a blanket time of 11 years.

Hoeyster said:

My customer's supplier quality requirements only states one item to be retained for a period of eleven (11) years, Material Certs. But then further into the procedure it states,copies of records shall be maintained for the life of the document or eleven (11) years or as specified by contract or regulatory authority.
Now how in the heck and I supposed to tell the management of my company how long they are to retain all their documents. I gave them a blanket time of 11 years.

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11 years is way too long for most simple stuff like basic daily production data. You must have shelves full by now. Most of the other stuff doesn't take quite so much space.

You don't name the customer, but the QS-9000 book had a nice list of reasonable retention times, and the Big 3 have continued to adopt those.

Your accountant and attorney can also give you some guidance. And of course, the good ol' IRS.

Rachel said:

However, I don't think management will ever budge on the R&D records. We have a complete library of all of our reserach efforts from the company's creation in the late seventies, to now. Everything is filed. It's all hard copies, unfortunately, but they're never going to toss that stuff. The intellectual property is too valuable - and, honestly, is referenced quite a bit. It's all of our product history!

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If you are getting benefit, there is no reason to discard. Especially intellectual property. I would keep it indefinitely too.

We're making up our retention list only for paper copies - any other records are stored indefinitely on the network (backups, CDs, etc.). Is this fair enough?

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Fair enough, but the electronic records should be mentioned on the list as well. They are part of it. But calling them "indefinitely," is OK.

My company has two (2) aerospace customers and one (1) customer whose customer is the government.
I told my management to keep all aerospace records for eleven (11) years. Yes we are going to have reams and reams of records, but I feel I don't dare tell them anything less on aerospace. I couldn't believe it when I read the supplier quality requirements of record retention for 11 years. All those records deal with identification, traceability, costing, etc., so I feel eleven (11) years should be for all.

"copies of records shall be maintained for the life of the document or eleven (11) years or as specified by contract or regulatory authority."

Have your records procedures state almost verbatim the above quote. This gives you the option to destroy the records after 11 years unless otherwise specified in the Purchasing Document (PO, Contract). If you do have a requirement that states to maintain the records for 15 years than place them in a separate area from the normal 11 year retention.

This is my opinion and someone may not agree with it.


Coury Ferguson
Program/Contracts Manager

Re: Identification of Quality Records (ISO9001:2000 - 4.2.4) - How?

Hoeyster was saying something about retaining records for an 11 year period... (this is where the quotes weren't working!! idk what happened!?)


We have one customer (aerospace, as well) that requires records be kept for a period of 35 years. Seems like a little much for a company our size, but we have taken the steps to keep electronic files of the documentation and it's updated weekly to a back up drive for safe keeping. We just don't have the space to keep piles and piles of paperwork for 35 years!

Re: Identification of Quality Records (ISO9001:2000 - 4.2.4) - How?

For those persons storing records on DVD/CD, what happens when that format goes the way of the 5 1/4 floppy disk? Any contingency plans in place?

Re: Identification of Quality Records (ISO9001:2000 - 4.2.4) - How?

Hi Lea,
In what particular part of document control procedure, you are having some problems. Why don’t you attached the said documents to the forum, so that all of us, can add or comment on the specific procedure you want to incorporate.
Best regards,
Raffy