Post-Delivery Activities
- How are post-delivery activities defined in ISO 9001:2015?
- What are some examples of post-delivery activities?
- What are some common auditing questions about post-delivery activities?
What Does the Standard Say About Post-Delivery Activities?
Do you know what your customers feel about you? Surely it’s important to understand how stock levels impact financial liability or the risks and opportunities associated with ongoing maintenance and warranties? These and more questions are answered when companies reflect on their post-delivery activities. Much of what ISO 9001:2015 says about post-delivery activities makes good business sense. Working through this clause will help organizations gain a better understanding of your business whether or not standard certification is your endgame.
In the old standard, organizations were still expected to address post-delivery activities, but the requirement was vague and intermixed with several different clauses. ISO 9001:2015 asks organizations to consider post-delivery activities consciously and cohesively as a stand-alone requirement. The new standard states that this is a worthy topic and lays out the extent to which it should be considered.
ISO 9001:2015 specifically discusses five key areas organizations should consider:
- Statutory and regulatory requirements
- Potential undesired consequences
- Nature, use, and intended lifetime of products and services
- Customer requirements
- Customer feedback
The following section offers ideas of different questions to consider within each of these areas.
What Are Some Examples of Post-Delivery Activities?
Statutory and Regulatory Requirements
This is pretty straightforward. If any products or services require post-delivery activities or warranties, then organizations must adhere to them. This includes industry practices, or any legal or contractual requirements on post-delivery activities. This might include:
- Length of a warranty
- What exactly a warranty will cover
- How customers will communicate with the company
- Return processes
- Replacement or repair processes
- Recycling requirements
- Packaging requirements
Potential Undesired Consequences
This section asks organizations to map out potentially undesired consequences and how they plan on responding. This will naturally include discussions about risk and the scope of the reaction plan. Possibilities to consider include:
- Recall plans
- Marketing and publicity rectification
- Employee termination
- Legal protection
Nature, Use, and Intended Lifetime of Products and Services
This is most often included in a company’s return policy, warranty, or liability statement. This should also be considered during the design process. If there are no warranties offered, companies can simply state that there are no post-delivery activities. For companies who do offer post-delivery activities, questions to consider in this area might be:
- How exactly is the product/service intended to be used?
- How long do you want the product/service to last?
- How long do you need to support knowledge to repair the product?
- How long do you need to be able to stock replacement parts to repair the product?
- Are there recommended ages for this product?
- Are there situations where someone of a certain age using the product would affect the warranty given (children, for example)?
Customer Requirements
Some customers require specific demands to be met in order to enter into a contractual agreement with a company. In this case, companies need to consider how they will ensure their ability to meet these requirements. For example, companies might be asked to:
- Supply a specific number of products within a specified time frame
- Service a product for a specified number of years
- Carry spare products/parts for a specified number of years.
- Recycle unused parts
- Offer protection through delivery and receipt
Customer Feedback
Customer feedback fuels the continual improvement process, and thus is important when determining the scope of post-delivery activities. The feedback collection process need not be lengthy, but it’s important for an organization to think carefully about the feedback it wants to collect and how they intend to use it. This will help ensure the right questions are asked of customers. It’s important to acknowledge that the scope of post-delivery activities will change overtime in response to customer feedback that is collected.
Common Auditing Questions About Post-Delivery Activities
What are some other examples of post-delivery activities as identified in Clause 8.5 that I need to consider?
The sections above offer high-level examples of different post-delivery activities organizations need to address for ISO compliance. Below are additional specific examples that might help in planning for meeting this requirement.
- Customer training
- Warranty management
- Service calls
- Nonconformance management
- Customer satisfaction assessment
- Customer follow-up
- On-site installation of equipment or disposal of old equipment
- Technical support
- Customer access to online information regarding a product or service purchase (booking reservations for future services/experiences, for example)
- Collection and analysis of in-service data
Don’t some of these categories overlap with other clauses in the standard? For example, non conforming products or services delivered to the customer (i.e. 8.7 and 10.2)?
There is plenty of overlap within the standard if organizations are thorough in examining the workings of their companies. However, organizations shouldn’t consider documenting these overlaps as an either/or placement. Many topics should be addressed in more than one area because they are integrated in different parts of the organization. Just because a company has documented one activity in one area does not mean it should be ignored in another. Organizations should consider how these activities play a part in a variety of different quality control areas of their business and demonstrate their knowledge of these intricate connections at work.