It is rant time. There is so much BS in determining the number of sites for a certification. It is a dark art, and our friendly certification providers deliberately make it so. There is no transparency, well, there is at least an invisibility cloak surrounding the details. But enough of the hocus pocus.
You will need to dig very deep into a certification providers rules, guidelines and terms to find what criteria they are using to determine how many sites will be audited during a certification audit, a surveillance audit and a recertification audit.
Most will just, apparently, make up a number and then hide behind the statement, ‘these are JASANZ requirements’. Then there is the straight gouge, where no multi-site plan is even offered a client. They just see x number of sites, audit x number of sites. Some try and to appear user friendly and split the number of sites between 6 monthly visits but it is pure revenue chasing as the same 100% total is audited over a 12 month period.
The golden rule of multi-site auditing is a simple square root of the total number of sites. To be more accurate it is the square root of the number of sites having the same scope and then added together, which does add to the complexity but it will provide a saving. There are also complications due to risk of activities, more than one standard, more than one system and so on, but it is a negotiable point which needs to be clearly defined and redefined when circumstance demands.
Do not tolerate a subpar customer focus from your certifier just because they are too inflexible to meet your changing needs or because it is too complex requiring a create solution. Review your sample plan every time you add or subtract a site and make sure that every three years when your certificate is up for renewal, you get a new proposal, a new contract, a new sample plan for your business as ‘rules’ change and such changes may provide you with better outcomes.
No comments:
Post a Comment