Meeting of the Expert Team on Centre Audit/Certification
(ET-CAC)
Info on the meeting
Location: Darmstadt, Germany
Date: 18 - 20 October 2017
Working Hours: 1:00pm* to 5:30pm on Wed 18 October, 9:00am to 5:30pm on Thu 19 October and 09:00 to 15:00 on Friday 20 October (all times CEST, i.e. UTC+2)
Meeting Room: To be advised
Chair:
Kevin Alder
Local Contact:
Lothar Wolf
WMO contacts:
Jeremy Tandy and
David Thomas
* participants may arrive at EUMETSAT from midday and take lunch on-site.
Final Report
ET-CAC2017 final report (draft)
Meeting Background
Resolution 51 (Cg-16) conditionally designated those WIS centres listed in Table 4 of the annex that resolution for a limited duration, subject to demonstration of the pre-operational compliance requirements of the Commission for Basic Systems (CBS). Resolution 31 (Cg-17) extended the conditional designation of those WIS centres listed in Table 3 of the annex to that resolution until the sixteenth session of CBS.
Resolution 7 (EC-69) endorsed the WIS centres listed in Table 1 and Table 2 of the Annex to Recommendation 14 (CBS-16) as compliant with the Technical Specifications laid out in the Manual on WIS (WMO No. 1060) .
However, there are a number of WIS centres that remain only conditionally designated. Recommendation 14 (CBS-16) requested CBS Management Group to consider whether it would be appropriate to ask Executive Council to further extend the conditional designation of centres. No request was made on behalf of CBS to the sixty-ninth session of Executive Council in such regard. Therefore, those WIS centres remaining only conditionally designated will be removed from Table 2 of Appendix B of the Manual on WIS unless urgent demonstration of the operational compliance procedures can be achieved.
Furthermore, as per the audit schedule for Global Information System Centres (GISCs) specified in the Manual on WIS §2.5 Rolling Review of WIS centres, the majority of GISCs are overdue their interim audits (for dates of GISC audits, refer to: ICT-ISS-2014 final report Table 1 Status of GISC Audits).
The sixteenth session of CBS Management Group (paragraphs §73 and §141 of the final report refer) recognised that a team in quality auditing could serve all CBS centre registrations rather than being limited to WIS centres, including the audit procedures being implemented by the amendments to the Manual on GDPFS.
Additionally, in paragraph §3 of their letter (ref. AN 10/1-IND/17/11 dated 9 June 2017), ICAO invite WMO to assist in the designation of space weather information providers by assessing each potential candidate centre through site visits and audits.
In accordance with the terms of reference for the Expert Team on Centre Audit/Certification (ET-CAC), as approved in Decision 33 (CBS-16), and responding to the points raised above, this meeting of ET-CAC will progress the following items from the OPAG-ISS Work Plan (the final report of the seventeenth session of CBS Management Group refers)
ET-CAC01 Establish an overall adapted audit process
ET-CAC02 Run GISCs certification process
ET-CAC03 Coordinate DCPCs and NCs certification
The meeting will:
Begin development of an adapted audit and certification process to support all WMO programmes and Technical Commissions;
Provide training to members of ET-CAC such that they are able to discharge their duties as an auditors of WMO centres; and
Plan and schedule completion of GISC interim audits and outstanding audits for WIS centres that remain conditionally designated.
Agenda
Team structure (the who is who, the geographic diversity, roles and responsibilities)
Review of TOR (clarification and explanation of what is meant by the TOR, what is expected, what is the impact of this in terms of work load)
Provision and explanation of already existing documentation including outline which we want to tailor, evolve, definition of new documentation
Provision of background information from the past audit team versions (what was done, lessons learnt, elements for improvement, elements we wish to keep)
General working principles (code of conduct of our group, reporting, Confidentiality, Impartiality, meetings, documentation pool, means of communication, interfaces to other ETs and outside of ISS)
ISO9001:2015 focus (Explanation what that means compared to past audits, provision of a ISO9001:2015 training document)
Assessment of current audit status within WIS
Definition of a first work plan, identification of the main time drivers and mile stones and distribution of first tasks across the team, Schedule, key Events, CBS-TECO (2018)
Deliverables “Audit Principles”, “Work Plan”
Timings for the agenda are not fixed. However, to accommodate remote participants the following items are scheduled for specific times:
Space Weather assessments and audits, Greg Brock (Thursday morning)
Briefing on WMO Quality Management Framework, Dimitar Ivanov (Friday morning, 10-minutes)
Participants
Kevin ALDER (chair)
Lothar WOLF (co-chair and host)
Weiqing QU
Tobias SPEARS
Jacques ANQUETIL
Mark FRANCIS
Eugene BURGER
Kenji KOSUGE
Sungsoo DO
Thorsten BÜSSELBERG
Kai-Thorsten WIRT
Daniele BIRON (remote participant)
Jeremy TANDY (secretariat)
Greg Brock (secretariat, remote participant, Thursday morning only)
The following members of ET-CAC were unable to attend:
ZHU Ting
Fatima Zahra BENSAID
Sunghoi HUH
Group photo
All participants should read the material listed below in preparation for the ET-CAC2017.
ISO9001:2015
Regulatory material relating to quality management within WMO
Guide to the implementation of a Quality Management System for NMHS, WMO-No. 1100 , draft 2017 edition amended to reflect change to ISO 9001:2015, replaces WMO-No. 1100 2013 edition . This document provides an overview of ISO9001:2015 and a detailed discussion on the clauses of that standard. It also includes information about internal and external audits within the procedure for implementing a QMS (see chart on pp58-59), which are further elaborated in §6.11, §6.12, §6.13 and §6.14 (pp67-70).
Resolution 20 (EC-69) (see final report WMO-No. 1196 ) outlines "Amendment to the Technical Regulation (WMO No 49), Volume I - General Meteorological Standards and Recommended Practices (Quality Management Provisions)". The details of the amendment are provided in the Annex to the Resolution, introducing some definitions and a new Part VII on Quality Management (building on Resolution 7 (Cg-17) "WMO Quality Management Framework"). In particular, the new provisions include:
1.2 Members ... should establish and implement a QMS
1.3.1 (l) "monitor, measure, analyse and evaluate ... through rigorous audit schedule"
1.4.1 QMS should be in conformity with ISO9001
1.4.2 demonstration of compliance ... should be by audit
Resolution 7 (Cg-17) WMO Quality Management Framework (see final report WMO-No. 1157 )
Decision 76 (EC-68) WMO Quality Management Framework - Organisation-wide approach (see final report WMO-No. 1168 )
Regulatory material for WIS Centre audits
Audit materials from previous phase of WIS Centre audits
Draft materials for audit of space weather centres (provided by IPT-SWeISS/TT-AVI)
Template for submissions
Doc XX - Document template
Documents
Working docs
Getting to EUMETSAT (meeting location)
Details for getting to EUMETSAT can be found on their "contact us" page
Accommodation during ET-CAC2017.
In general EUMETSAT recommend booking hotels via one of the booking portals such as booking.com or similar since they do not maintain a list of hotels nor do they have special arrangements or room rates with any of the possible hotels. (put in the search field our Address: 64295 EUMETSAT Allee)
However, our host (Lothar) notes that he has personally been in each of the hotels that are in walking distance and can confirm that those are all ok. Prices are unfortunately unpredictable due to them being mainly driven by Trade Fair events in Frankfurt City but normally they are between 60 Euro and 140 Euro. In this 1km distance to EUMETSAT we have two variants of Maritim Hotel, a B&B Hotel, two variants of IBIS Hotels.
Transport from Frankfurt Airport:
by taxi: approx. 45-50 Euro
by bus: Airliner. This bus travels every 30min and price is approx. 8.50 Euro. The bus will start Terminal 1, then continue to Terminal 2 and the first stop is called “Mina Rees Strasse” where you should leave. From there you continue walking on Mina Rees…then turn right onto Am Kavalleriesand and then right again towards EUMETSAT. (total distance 250m)