Site specific certification
Did you know that when a company gets certified, it is only certified at the nominated site or sites, and only to the defined scope of certification?
The site specific thing is intriguing. I thought at the beginning of this great industry in the late eighties, yes last century, that site specific certification was just a fee gouge. It probably still is, but in these modern days of connectivity and centralisation of services such as accounts, sales, administration, etc, it might be more so than ever as certification providers can’t get their head around the modern world we live in.
Some business to business activities require site specific controls. These include fabrication, extraction and manufacturing processes. Remember them. You know when we actually made stuff. With a thoughtful scope and a dynamic, interconnected quality management system, just one site is all that is needed to be covered by your certification.
This of course, doesn’t mean that you don’t roll out all policies, systems, workflows, protocols, inductions, etc, etc to every employee at every location to ensure that we are all on the same page. But the cost of certification to keep an arbitrary JAS-ANZ ruling happy has got to be questioned.
And if you are using certification to ‘secret police’ your branch activities are being adhered too, then you are on a very slippery slope indeed.
Should you choose to be ‘right-sited’ to meet your own needs, then will be implications concerning the use of certification marks, claims of quality assurance, definition of the length and breadth of a certification program, but to take a leaf out of the good ol’ standards book, you should base your decision making based on risk and customer expectations.