HandsOnQuality.com SECTION 2 SUMMARY Audit Purpose, Psychology, Types, Frequency, Duration and Requirements What is an Audit? An audit is comparing the existing situation to the required one. For example, to the standard requirements against the company processes. Or the product functionality, against the designed functionality. Audit Purpose An internal audit has 2 purposes: 1. Evaluation and improvement 2. Prepare the organization to the certification audit. During the audit we stop our work for a while, and review the processes – how well are the functioning? What problems do we deal with? Does our activities compliant to the standard requirements, for which the company is certificated to? Preparing the organization for the audit, reducing the concerns of the auditees, and Exactly as we are getting ready for an exam, by solving previous exams questions. An internal audit is like a house inspection. We do not want a perfect report from the house inspection company. We want to know what is wrong, and then decide what to fix. Obviously, if something may risk our safety, we would fix it immediately. Audit Psychology Most of the auditees do not feel comfortable during the audit. They afraid that nonconforming findings during the audit, are indication of the auditee low performance. Managers often expecting a “perfect” report, from lack of understanding the audit purpose. Our goal is to remove the fear wall between us, the auditor, and the company. Because, otherwise, we are not going to receive cooperation and fail to come up with real findings, that will benefit the organization. Page 1 of 3 © All rights reserved to Danielle Volski. Copying or networking is prohibited . HandsOnQuality.com Types of Audit The fours classical types of audits are: • Internal audit • Certification audit • Supplier audit (our company audits its supplier) • Customer (our customer audits our company) In an internal audit, we are examining ourselves, just like we take example tests, prior the real one, to estimate our knowledge level. Certification audit is the test. A certification organization auditor is arriving at our company, interviews employees and collect records, to estimate if the company meets the requirements of the audited standard. A certification audit is always for receiving or renewing a certificate to a specific standard, such as ISO 9001. Supplier audit is when our company quality manager arrives at our company supplier, to audit the supplier processes and facilities. This usually takes place, when our company is choosing a critical supplier, that have a great impact on our products or services. Customer audit is when our company is audited by the customer quality manager, who arrives at our company, to audit the processes and our facilities. Audit Frequency Usually, an audit takes place once a year, either if it's an internal audit, a certification one. Why? The best audit frequency is once a year, because: 1. An audit cost money, and we do not want to spend too much on audits. 2. It disturbs the company activities, which may do more harm than benefit of the audit. 3. The organization cannot improve all day, no need to collect more and more nonconformities, while we do not have the capacity to handle them anyway As for internal audit, we may audit every department once in 3 years. What if our company have 10 customers that require an annual audit? In that case, we can overlap the customer audit with the internal one and do it in the same day and the same time. Page 2 of 3 © All rights reserved to Danielle Volski. Copying or networking is prohibited . HandsOnQuality.com If the company have several standards, once again, we may audit more than one standard per audit. Especially if the same requirements appear in the standards, such as management review, you’ll find in many ISO standards, and you can audit it once for all of them. Audit Duration A single audit of one process or one department, usually takes between 1 to 3 hours, depends on the auditor familiarity with the department and its processes. Now, the duration of an audit event, in which we are conducting on several audits, usually takes several days. But each single audit duration may vary, again, depending on the department size, and number of the processes or their complexity. As a rule of thumb recommended to limit a single audit to 1.5 hours or maximum of 2 hours. If we have 10 departments to audit, then one way to divide it, is to carry out 3 audits in the first 2 days, and the rest in the third day. I recommend allocating half hour or at least 15 minutes break between each audit, since the audit usually does not end by the minute on the scheduled time, and we may move to another office for the next audit, which may reside in another floor or even another building. Audit Requirements Knowing the requirements prior the audit is fundamental to be able to carry out an effective audit. In most organizations, the internal audit conducted due to one or more standards the company has certification too. Therefore, the auditor first priority is to make sure that the organization compliant with the standard, for which the auditor must understand the requirements. So, here is a simple method to both understand the requirements and check compliance. The auditor should ask - what process or process are covering each requirement. Because, once the auditor comparing the standard sections to the actual processes, then he will realize if the process covers all the requirements, or just partially, what requirements have no processes. Remember that the standard says WHAT to do, and the organization decide HOW to do it. So, this comparison of the standard sections to the actual process, is usually carried out within the audit, but the company quality manager, may do it before the audit, if he is familiar with the departments processes. Page 3 of 3 © All rights reserved to Danielle Volski. Copying or networking is prohibited .
