4.1 Organizational Context
AGE is committed to defining our position in the marketplace and understanding how relevant factors arising from legal, political, economic, social and technological issues influence our strategic direction and our organizational context.
AGE identifies, analyzes, monitors and reviews factors that may affect our ability to satisfy our customers and stakeholders, as well as factors that may adversely affect the stability of our processes, or our management system’s integrity. To ensure that our QMS is aligned with our strategy, while taking into account the relevant internal and external factors, we initially collect and analyze pertinent information in order to determine potential impact on our context and subsequent business strategy.
AGE then monitors and reviews this information to ensure that a continual understanding of our organizational context is maintained. To facilitate the understanding of our context, we regularly consider issues that influence our context during management review meetings and are conveyed via minutes and business planning documents.
The output from this activity is evident as an input to the consideration of risks and opportunities, and the actions that we take to address them. Refer to QSM-6.1 for more information about our risk and opportunity management framework.
Documented Information for Organizational Context
Although ISO 9001:2015 does not require our organizational context to be maintained as documented information, AGE may maintain and retain the following documented information to describe our organizational context:
- Analysis of business plans, strategies, and statutory and regulatory commitments
- Analysis of technology and competitors
- Economic reports both globally and specific to the industries we serve
- Technical reports from technical experts and consultants
- SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis reports or schedules for internal issues
- Minutes of meetings (Management and design review minutes), process maps and reports, etc.
SWOT analysis provides our organization with a framework for reviewing and evaluating our strategies, and the position and direction of our organization, business propositions and other ideas.