No, you can’t fire the individual auditors but you (or your company) can change your certification body, which I think what RickJay is suggesting. If all they are doing is looking at traceability they are not doing their job. You are paying them money to assess you against a standard where traceability is **not **an absolute requirement. ISO9001:2008 says “Where appropriate, the organisation shall identify …” and “Where traceability is a requirments, the organisation shall…”. These are the sort of things the organisation has to decide for itself depending on their own business - and again we come back to satisfying the customer needs.
Out of interest, how long ago was this? The old 1994 edition of 9001, with its manufacturing bias, used to lead to this sort of thing pretty often but 9001:2000 was a massive step change in allowing the organisation to define what it needed to deliver its product.
A final thought. However good third party auditors are they are not going to know about your products and how they are made. What they should be able to understand is how your management system is set up to deliver your product and - this they may need help on - how you meet the specific requirements of the standard.
But you can hire a different company, surely? (Or, your employer could.) If the auditors know absolutely nothing about their product they’re doubly useless. They don’t have to know as much about it as you do - well, they couldn’t, really - but they should have some familiarity with the type of business. You cannot send an auditor into, say, an injection molding company to lead an audit there unless he or she has some experience in a similar industry, either work or audit experience. They’re not going to know your business the way you do but they should be familiar with the general type of business. I would not, for instance, be permitted to lead an audit in a pulp and paper mill. But I can lead audits in machine shops, consulting businesses, transportation, and a number of other things, because I’ve either worked in those businesses or supported a lot of audits.
An auditor just looking at traceability is effectively ignoring ninety percent of the standard, at least. Do they not look at how you track nonconformances? At how you measure how well your processes are working? At the effectiveness of your training? They’re supposed to be examining your inspection procedures and how you take care of your inspection equipment. They’re supposed to be verifying that your top management are personally reviewing certain things, like customer feedback info. They’re supposed to be looking at how you ensure youir facility and infrastructure aren’t deficient in some way that might affect your product. And all of it must concentrate on customer satisfaction; if the customers are not satisfied (and it’s up to your company to make sure they are, not just assume it) the system is deficient. If the auditors aren’t looking at that stuff you’re getting scammed, big time.
Northern Piper, I’ll expand more answers to your question this evening, when I get some time.
They did all of that except the “cusytomer satisfaction” part, but I looked at the Wikipedia article on ISO-9001, and it notes that “customer satisfaction” was added after 2000 (when I shepherded our company through the last audit before I left), so there was no requirement for “reviewing customer satisfaction” before that time.
Sill, “customer satisfaction” *still[./i] isn’t 90% of the business of ISO,. based on that writeup. Most of it is still concerned with making sure that you have written standards and procedures and traceability (I never said it was only traceability} and stick to it: