Internal Audit - The Uncomfortable Truth
For anyone with a background in Quality Assurance, it is accepted wisdom that a sound Internal Audit programme is the bedrock of compliance to International Standards and the platform for best practice and business excellence.
And this is of course true.
However, achieving a successful Internal Audit programme need not follow the traditional, accepted path of, creating an audit team drawn from other departments in your organization and then getting them properly trained to be able to do effective audits.
In fact, there is often a whiff of not being a 'proper' Quality Manager if you DON'T follow this path.
However, there are problems that everyone responsible for Quality Assurance KNOWS exist with this approach, but rarely acknowledge, perhaps even to themselves:
- The expense of training the auditors
- The difficulties getting them released from their host department
- The inconsistent outputs (after all, each auditor is likely to only do a couple of audits a year, so its unlikely they will become highly proficient in it)
- The retraining when people leave the business
So if you consider the full cost of these issues, at a conservative estimate, a functioning 6-person audit team would be costing in the region of £15,000 a year.
So we are offering an alternative path, that will reduce your costs and improve the quality of the outputs.
We have been auditing internally and externally for over 30 years, through all of the various iterations of ISO9001, from its roots in the Military and NATO Standards, through its commercial infancy as BS5750 and then through all of its versions as ISO9001...so we are very experienced in getting the very best from an audit activity.
The recent COVID pandemic showed us that it is possible to undertake an effective internal audit remotely, and as we now "return to normal" we should learn from that experience, and retain what did prove to be successful when we had no choice, and continue to use it, now that we have choice again.
Therefore, we are offering a full Internal Audit service to customers, which will be a blend of face-to-face and remote audits, tailored to meet your specific needs, and will:
- Almost certainly cost less than your existing Internal Audit programme is right now
- Be undertaken by an auditor with decades of experience
- Provide you with what you really want...a clear indication where things are going well, where things might need attention and perhaps most importantly, where there are issues that would jeopardize your registration to ISO9001
If you would like an informal, no obligation chat, please contact us vis the 'contacts' page.