Closing Minor Non-conformities in 28 days?

I just received this communication from my CB. Why the change?

The FSSC 22000 Board of Stakeholders released a new list of decisions on the 17th of February 2020 and has modified the following in FSSC Scheme version 5 (bullet 2 of 6.2.1): 

6.2.1 Minor nonconformity 
A minor nonconformity shall be issued when the finding does not affect the capability of the management system to achieve the intended results: 

2)    The CB shall review the corrective action plan and the evidence of correction and approve when acceptable. The CB approval shall be completed within 28 calendar days after the last day of the audit. Exceeding this timeframe by the organization shall result in a suspension of the certificate. 

This change will be effective from the 1st of June 2020

What does this change mean for your organization?

Whenever a minor nonconformity is raised by your auditor, the auditor was previously required to review and approve your CAP (Corrective Action Plan) within three (3) months after the last day of the audit. This has now been reduced to 28 calendar days. 

As normal, the CAP shall include:  

• objective evidence of the corrections taken (what you have done to eliminate a detected nonconformity); 
• a root cause analysis (an investigation into the cause(s) of the nonconformity and exposed risks); 
• the proposed corrective actions (what you will do to prevent the nonconformity from re-occurring).

This plan shall be specified for each nonconformity that is detected by your auditor during the audit. 

Effectiveness of implementation of the CAP shall be reviewed by the auditor, at the next scheduled on-site audit at the latest.   

Please be aware that exceeding the time-frame of 28 days shall result in a suspension of the certificate. The time frames for the review and approval of a CAP regarding a major nonconformity (28 calendar days) and a critical nonconformity (14 calendar days) remain unchanged. 

Actually this rule existed for previous versions also, only for closing of corrective action plan. Now they just forced companies and auditor to finish the whole thing in 28 days, auditors to be precise. 

For you this would mean that minor nonconformity needs to be corrected with the corrective action in this time scale (lets say you have 25 days for corrections, finding the root cause and defining of corrective action). Rest 3 days auditor will use to review the CAP. 

Mainly this rule is applied to be in line with the GFSI requirements for all certification schemes. 

BR,

Surčinski