Understanding Quality Audits and Tips to Prepare.

While a QMS defines a company's commitment to quality, auditing ensures that this commitment is met and upheld. Auditing is crucial to a quality management system (QMS), and an audit ensures that what a company claims to be doing aligns with what it's actually doing.

It helps drive continual improvement as processes and customer needs change, ensuring that your QMS remains relevant, adaptable,? ?and effective. An audit is essentially a health check for your business processes, involving the people involved, your sampling rule, and what you're checking.

The people involved refer to both the auditor (conducting the check) and the auditee (being checked). Also, audits need to be conducted with the people who actually do the jobs, so to ensure that they are competent and compliant to processes and procedures and requirements of the standard.

The auditor's sample rule involves the set of number or benchmarks against which the company's processes are evaluated. What you're checking refers to the specific area or process being examined, which could include anything from financial accounts to production quality. This should also be communicated at your opening meeting to ensure that you are being clear and transparent to the auditee.

In quality management, there are three main categories of audits, which depend on the relationship between the auditor and the person being audited. These are called?third-party audits, second-party audits, and first-party audits.

Know the difference, and don’t get confused

Do you need to do second-party audits on your suppliers to better understand their capability to meet your needs? How can you gain more from your third-party audits? What needs to be done to improve your internal first-party audits to work toward improvement? By understanding the different types of audits and what they mean for you, you can more easily know how they can best be used in your organization to work toward improvement of the quality management system.

Each type of audit serves a unique purpose and provides different insights into a business's operations.

Internal audits (First Party) - are self-assessments, where someone from your own company checks how things are going, similar to a practice test for spotting and fixing problems before they are detected by others.

Supplier audits (Second Party) - involve evaluating vendors to ensure that they are performing their jobs correctly.

Third-party audits (Third Party) - provide a neutral assessment of your company and can significantly boost your company's image if certification or a positive review is achieved. Effective audit preparation is crucial for successful reviews. It is advised to document everything, maintain a good team that is capable and ready for the audit, and ensure that processes and documents are intuitive for easy follow-up.

A culture of proactivity must be promoted around your Audit schedule as they play a key role in ensuring quality, compliance, and continuous improvement, and by understanding and preparing effectively for them, your business leaders can turn them into valuable tools for growth.

For Effective Audit Preparation

Whether you’re gearing up for an internal review or a third-party evaluation, preparation is crucial. To do well, experts advise the following:

Document everything: If you didn’t record it, it never happened.

??tip #1 - In other words: No matter how good your processes are, if they aren’t well-documented, they might as well not exist (from an audit perspective). You must have a traceable path to meet the customer requirements agreed.

Maintain a good team: It’s crucial to have a dedicated team prepared for the audit.

??tip #2 - Assign capable individuals, and ensure they are trained well and can handle the stress and strains of an audit.

?Make it instinctive:?Your processes, procedures and documents should be easy to follow.

??tip #3 - Make the documents intuitive so that anyone can follow the logic, reducing training needs and ensure both compliance and competence.

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What good looks like for your audits

Auditors should deliver professional, high-quality audits through:

• a strong internal culture focused on quality audits and professional questioning.
• applying appropriate resources, experience and expertise to audits
• effective internal audit supervision and review
• robust accountability mechanisms
• identifying and addressing audit risks and issues on a timely basis
• accepting and addressing findings from audit inspections, including findings on risk values and opportunity recognition.

By consistently assessing the effectiveness of corrective actions taken to address non-conformities, a proactive approach to quality management is established. This practice not only guarantees ongoing compliance but also cultivates a dynamic culture of learning and enhancement. As a result, your organisation becomes better at swiftly adapting to challenges, fostering innovation, and refining processes to achieve optimal outcomes that benefit the customer.

In conclusion, auditing is a crucial part of maintaining a compliant management system, and to get the most out of your ISO standard, you should conduct regular audits to ensure there are no deviations whether that means training someone internally or bringing in external support.

Audits might seem like just another box to check off, but understanding them can help you approach them effectively. It’s also important that you thoroughly understand the standard that you are evaluating. Familiarise yourself with the specific requirements, objectives, and processes outlined in the standards. This understanding will serve as the foundation for your internal audit checklist. Either way, remember, auditing should be conducted as a way of continuous improvement, and to support your organisation to thrive.