Trinity Operating Procedures - TOPs

TOP-POLCY: Policy Establishment Process

Rev: 12/06/2017

Scope: The Trinity Forge & Machine "Policy Establishment" Core Process.

Procedure:

"Policy Establishment" is the most all-encompassing of the core processes. Policy Establishment represents the exercise of the leadership by upper management and is inherently non-procedural. The results may be found in the Scope, the Mission, the Quality Policy, the Processes, the Quality Objectives, and the Quality Manual. The input to the Policy Establishment process is completely at the discretion of upper management, but notably includes the results of the Review and Improvement process and the flow of information developed through relationships with customer and industry executives. The results of Policy Establishment govern all other company processes.

Required in the process to comply with quality standards:

• Consideration of the external and internal issues (both negative and positive) relevant to the company’s purpose and strategic direction that affect the company’s ability to achieve the intended results of its quality management system. This might include legal, technological, competitive, market, cultural, social, and economic issues, whether international, national, regional, or local, and issues related to values, culture, knowledge, and organization performance.
• Consideration and documentation of the requirements of interested parties relevant to the quality management system, including those of customers and applicable statutory and regulatory agencies.
• Determination of the boundaries and applicability of the quality system to validate the scope, with consideration of the above and with the company’s current and potential products and services.
• Determination of the processes needed for the quality management system and their application throughout the organization, including for each process:
• required inputs.
• expected outputs.
• sequence and interaction with other processes.
• criteria and methods (including monitoring, measurements, and related performance indicators) needed to ensure effective operation and control.
• necessary resources and their availability.
• responsibilities and authorities.
• risks, considering:
• possibilities to avoid risk.
• taking risk to pursue opportunity.
• eliminating the source of risk.
• changing the likelihood of consequences.
• sharing risk.
• retaining risk by informed decision .
• opportunities, considering possibilities to:
• adopt new practices.
• launch new products.
• open new markets.
• address new customers.
• build partnerships.
• embrace new technology.
• utilize "out of the box" approaches to help the company or the customers.
• actions, proportionate to the potential impact on the conformity of products and services, are planned, seeking:
• assurance that the quality system can achieve the intended results.
• enhancement of desirable effects.
• reduction or prevention of undesirable effects.
• achievement of improvement.
• integration and implementation of related changes into the quality system.
• evaluation of the effectiveness of planned actions.
• documents and records.
• Demonstration of leadership in:
• taking accountability for the effectiveness of the quality program.
• ensuring the quality policy is established, compatible with the company ’s context and strategic direction, appropriate as a framework for quality objectives, committed to satisfying applicable requirements, committed to continual improvement of the quality management system; that it is documented, communicated to employees, understood, and applied within the company, and available to relevant outside parties.
• ensuring the quality objectives are established (What will be done? What resources will be required? Who will be responsible? When will it be completed? How will the results be evaluated?), measurable, monitored and updated, compatible with the company’ s context, strategic direction, quality policy and applicable requirements, relevant to conformity of products and services and enhancement of customer satisfaction, and communicated.
• ensuring the integration of the quality management system into the company’s core processes.
• ensuring customer, statutory and regulatory requirements are determined, understood, and met.
• ensuring risks and opportunities that can affect conformity of products and services and the ability to enhance customer satisfaction are determined and addressed, and there is focus on enhancing customer satisfaction.
• promoting the use of the project approach and risk-based thinking.
• ensuring that resources needed by the quality management system are available.
• communicating the importance of effective quality management and conformance.
• engaging, directing, and supporting people to contribute to the effectiveness of the quality program.
• promoting improvement.
• supporting managers to demonstrate leadership in their areas of responsibility.
• ensuring responsibilities and authorities for roles are assigned, communicated, and understood.
• identifying a specific Management Representative (specified in the quality manual to be the QA Manager) who has responsibility and authority to ensure the quality system meets the quality standards, to ensure the processes are delivering their intended outputs, to report to upper management on the performance of the quality system and on opportunities for improvement, to ensure the promotion of customer focus throughout the organization, to ensure the integrity of the quality system is always maintained even as it evolves, and to have organizational freedom and unrestricted access to upper management and external parties to resolve quality management issues.
• Determination of the resources needed to accomplish the above, with consideration of the capabilities of, and constraints on, existing internal resources including people, infrastructure, measuring capability, and the work environment, and what needs to be obtained from external sources.
• Documentation of the above in the Management Review File.

Certain "stakeholders" in Trinity Forge require notification whenever there is a change in fundamental aspects of the company, such as core policies, controlling ownership, executive management, plant location, or quality system certification. The Quality Assurance Manager maintains the Stakeholder Notification Registry of what entity has what notification requirements then, when there is an applicable change, ensures timely notification is made per registry.

Other processes and activities that closely relate to the Policy Establishment process are:

• Review and Improvement Process
• Management Review and Planning

Revision history: