4.3. Contract Review

4.3.1. General

Your organization must have a systematic and documented method for ensuring that you understand and meet the customers' needs. If your specifications differ from your customer requirements, there must be an orderly method for reconciliation. You must also have a way to ensure that you have adequate capacity to meet the combined needs of all customers, if applicable. The ISO 9000 standard also suggests that communications be maintained with the customer during the life of the order as appropriate.

This clause seeks to ensure that:

• You have documented procedures for the input and review of your customer's orders.

4.3.2. Review

You are required to review your customer's orders prior to accepting them. To be considered effective, you must first ensure a complete understanding of what they are asking for. The standard indicates a preference for the written order, but the authors understand that a verbal order is fairly common. In this case, they ask you to put a methodology in place that ensures the verbal order is confirmed and agreed to at the time of acceptance. When you receive the order, you must make sure you can honor it in all respects.

Therefore, you must confirm that:

• The customers' order is well documented or well understood if verbally given prior to accepting the order.
• You have the capability to meet the order and all discrepancies are resolved prior to the order.

4.3.3. Amendment to contract

On occasion your customer may change their order, or worse yet, you may not be able to meet your original requirement. You must have a documented system in place that defines how you go about communicating and executing these changes with your customer, as well as your own internal organization.

The standard states that:

• You must show a documented system on how you make changes to an order and methods employed to ensure the information is correctly transferred to all the affected parties.

4.3.4. Records

Upon review of a customer order by an authorized person, a record of the order and the review must be maintained.

• You must maintain a record of the customers' order for an appropriately defined period of time.