TVIB News Tava Foret

Subchapter M  TSMS Certificates – Compliance Dates Are Fast Approaching

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Have you selected your Third-Party Organization for Subchapter M Compliance?  Have you entered into a formal agreement yet?  Don’t wait until July 20, 2018 to start planning for your External Management Audit for a TSMS Certificate. You must be operating under a valid TSMS Certificate for a minimum of 6 months prior to the issuance of a COI for a vessel.

If you are AWO RCP Certified and have a Mid-Period Management Audit due this year, you should consider having your External Management Audit for a TSMS Certificate completed in conjunction with your RCP Mid-Period Management Audit.  Your Mid-Period Management Audit will need to review the gap between your last certification audit and the 2016 revisions to the RCP, in addition to the requirements for a Mid-Period Management Audit. The delta between that audit and a TSMS Compliance audit is not that great.

If your company is AWO RCP Certified, have you considered what you audit rotation cycle will look like?  There could be an overlap of audit cycles for RCP and TSMS compliance. TVIB stands ready to work with your organization to set up a plan to give you the greatest value in your upcoming audits while lessening the burden of overlapping audit cycles or “audit creep.”

TVIB will be releasing the External TSMS Management Process and Audit Checklist to its members in the coming days. Make certain that you have updated your contact information on the Member Portal so you can access these documents as soon as they are published. We will send out an announcement when they are available for download from the Member Portal on the TVIB website.

For more information on selecting TVIB as your TPO or if you have questions related to Subchapter M compliance, contact Tava Foret at 832-323-2155 or tavaf@thetvib.org or Chris Parsonage at 832-323-2188 or chrisp@thetvib.org.

Updated RCP Audit Process Documents – Publishing soon for use beginning July 1, 2017

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Stay tuned for the release of updated RCP Audit Process documents. Much work has gone into these updates and our subcommittees have been quite busy.  You can expect a streamlined approach to the RCP Management and Vessel Audits. We will also be rolling out the RCP Mid-Period Management Audit Process with this release.

Make certain that you have updated your contact information on the Member Portal so you can access these documents as soon as they are published. We will send out an announcement when they are available for download from the Member Portal on the TVIB website.

The updates will become effective July 1, 2017.  Any audits that begin prior to that date will be conducted using the audit checklists in place at that time.  Audit reports and letters of compliance drafted on July 1, 2017 or later must be done so using the updated documents.

If you have any questions you can email us at audits@thetvib.org. This is the email to use for all audit related activities and correspondence.

TVIB Certifies to the ISO 9001:2015 Standard with ZERO Nonconformities

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We recently took TVIB’s Quality Management System (QMS) and retooled the system into a single streamlined QMS to fully integrate the auditing aspects inherited from the purchase of Quality Auditing in 2016 along with TVIBs member services.  In conjunction with this effort the staff went through the rigors of upgrading the QMS from the ISO 9001:2008 standard to the ISO 9001:2015 standard.  With the upgrade in the standard we added the new elements required of the 2015 version to include Clause 4 – Context of the Organization and the increased focus in clauses 5-Leadership, 6-Planning, 7-Support, 8-Operation, 9-Performance Evaluation, and 10-Improvement.

We selected World Certification Services (WCS) Quality Registrars as our ISO registrar. On May 4th, we completed the Stage 1 Assessment with two action items to address.  On May 11th TVIB successfully completed the Stage 2 Assessment with ZERO nonconformities and were recommended for certification under ISO 9001:2015.

We are very proud of our staff for their efforts in bringing the two systems together and completing the certification audit with a clean record.  We stand ready to answer the needs of our Auditor, Surveyor and Supporting Organization Members.