A Non Conformance is an occurrence within a process where the process has not worked as defined, or where the process has not been followed as agreed. If the process is defined from a quality standard perspective (e.g., ISO9001, ISO14001, QS9000 etc), and when a non conformance is raised, it means that the process is not running in compliance to the quality standard.
A non conformance can be detected in several ways (e.g., when carrying out quality audits or in the daily workflow). Quality audits are, judging whether or not the company is able to meet its quality policies and objectives. The result is a report which highlights non-conformances and the appointment of a responsible person. The responsible person makes sure the non conformance is investigated and that correction action(s) are decided. The correction action shall eliminate the deficiency and enforce the process to be compliant with the quality standard or quality objective.
IFS Applications has a fully integrated Non Conformance Report (NCR) solution, which supports both raising a NCR directly from a quality audit, as well as raising it from any business object within the application. From a statistic point of view, it is then easy to sort out relevant NCR information (e.g., if a certain supplier is causing a lot of NCR’s when producing or delivering parts to the company).
For each step in the process a Security Checkpoint can be activated by an administrator. With an activated security checkpoint on a function it is necessary to authenticate the user again in order to fulfill the function. Additionally, whenever a security checkpoint is successfully passed, a security checkpoint log is written creating an audit trail of what is done.