Tuesday, 21 August 2012

Customer Property

So what is customer product?  It could be perfume samples in a magazine, coil aluminium for painting, your favourite photo for framing, soil samples for analysis, etc.

The standard implies you wouldn’t know how to control such things if in fact you did control such things as part of your product / service offerings.  It is a throwback to the manufacturing origins of the standard.  However, it is very important if you in fact do manage materials, products, records, etc on behalf of your customer, especially if they are to be incorporated into the final product / service.
 
My thinking is that if you do (and I would say almost a whole 1% of you might!), that you in fact you would already be doing what the standard requires.

So let me get down off my soap box and look at these requirements.  Your company exercises care with customer property while it is under your control or being used by you.  Your company identifies, verifies, protects and safeguards customer property provided for use or incorporation into the product.  If any customer property is lost, damaged or otherwise found to be unsuitable for use, it is reported to the customer and records maintained.

Just break it down into the components and describe them.  Yes, I would draft a procedure or at least a work instruction to manage these.  Make sure such processes are married to your control of nonconformance processes and as a best practice, treat all such items as you would any other inventory / bill of material item to ensure the integrity of the controls.

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