Since many people are aware that changes to the AGRSS® Standard are coming, there have been questions about the 2011 round of AGRSS® third-party validation reviews and how they might be affected by the changes.
The AGRSS®Council Inc. expects to submit the recent revisions to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and to receive ANSI approval later this year. Because of the timing of the changes, all 2011 validations will be conducted to the current ANSI/AGRSS® 002-2002 Automotive Glass Replacement Safety Standard.
The AGRSS®Council plans to provide stakeholders with information about the revisions to the Standard, and guidelines on how and when the transition to the revised Standard will be accomplished in the coming months. Stakeholders will be given the time and the information they need to transition to the revised Standard.
In the meantime, the validators will continue to utilize the ANSI/AGRSS® 002-2002 Automotive Glass Replacement Safety Standard. However, there are some things AGRSS®-Registered Companies can do now to get ready for the next revision of the Standard. These preparations will not hurt a company being validated to the current Standard, and will help them get ready for the next version.
1) Under the next version of the Standard, customer notification of driveaway time will be required both before and after the installation. Companies should begin to consider how to address this, if it is not already a part of their process.
2) In the next version of the Standard, companies will be required to keep the records required by the AGRSS® Standard for three years from the date at which the work was completed—or from the time the company becomes AGRSS®-Registered, whichever is shorter. Companies who don’t already keep records for this length of time should begin keeping their records for a longer period of time.
3) Additional training requirements will be added to the Standard, so companies may want to begin including additional personnel in their training sessions on the AGRSS® Standard. Personnel directly involved in the automotive glass replacement process (for example, scheduling, purchasing, installing, customer service, quality control and management) will be required to learn about the AGRSS® Standard. The Standard also will require companies to maintain records about this training, and the records must detail the content of the course, date, participants and acknowledgment of the participant’s successful completion of the training; a receipt of a printed copy of the current Standard also will need to be kept.
AGRSS® stakeholders should rest assured that all 2011 audits will be conducted to the current AGRSS® Standard, and that AGRSS®will continue to communicate with them about the upcoming changes.