customer referenced documents is a mandatory requirement of QMS 9000. Customer specifications, specifies that customer specifications would have to be periodically noted. It may be changed as per the quality of product and services.

Customer Referenced Documents and Specifications

This article is posted by by Advance Innovation Group student intended to help students or depth understanding about quality management system.

Before talking about customer referenced documents let’s understand a bit about Obsolete Documents.

When the documents are changed or amended then the older version of the documents are called as obsolete or outdated document. It is necessary to remove invalid or obsolete documents. The documents with no date and revision status can also be obsolete. These kinds of documents can be retained and are marked as SUPERSEDED or OBSOLETE.

Customer referenced documents and customer specifications

Customer – referenced documents

The need for preserving customer referenced documents is a mandatory requirement of QS 9000. There is a need to review and approve external documents prior to their release in order to establish their impact on the organization, the product, the process or the management system. The external document control procedure should make provision for new documents and amendments to such documents to be reviewed and approved for use prior to their issue into the organization.

Customer specifications

QS 9000 specifies that customer specifications would have to be periodically noted, analyzed and periodically reviewed and records which describe their feedback have to be maintained. This is not mandated in the ISO documentation.

Customer specifications might change depending on the product quality and service performance. Reviewing customer specifications will allow organizations to improve processes.

Data security and backup procedures.

Security and storage of Quality records is of major concern is ISO standards; you must consider environmental conditions and loss prevention actions. Storage addresses office storage for current records and records archived for future reference. The organization shall establish operating procedures to protect your documents, computer media, input/output data, and protect system documentation.

In this digital age of e-commerce and businesses operating geographical borders, you need to protect sensitive information when it passes over public networks. There should be good control of your organization’s media (which includes data). Data has to be protected from unintentional disclosure, modification, interruptions and unauthorized usage.

The organization has to comply with all relevant legislation that governs and controls the exchange of information and software between organizations. Your organization should have procedures to protect information and physical media exchanged within or between organizations.

Backup of computerized records: regular backup procedures should be followed to ensure that computerized data and records can be recovered in case of problem. Usually weekly backup procedures are conducted in many organizations. They have to be properly maintained (Obsolete data to be removed in a procedural manner)

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