Internal Audits - System and/or Compliance Audits

[Chris May]

I have recently "inherited" the task of scheduling and conducting our internal auditing.

A bit of background first..........

We manufacture electronic control systems for domestic central heating and hot water. Also, we manufacture meters for the utilities market.

This is achieved using cellular manufacturing and a ship to line Kanban system (no stores.......whoohooo!!)

I am just beginning on the road of 9K2K having been raised on ISO9001 '94. I have conducted audits before in a previous life, but I have a few questions.

The audit report form that I have at present has a checklist that is to be compiled prior to audit during the desktop system audit phase (does what we have documented cover the requirements).

This has a column for ref. Number (01,02..etc). The last page has a cross reference sheet to indicate which clauses of 9K2K you have covered by referering back to your ref number.

Now, due to the method of cellular manufacturing here, it appears to be more practical to audit by cell and conduct a Product / conformance audit (are we doing what we say we do).

However with cell manufacture, by looking at which clause of 9K2K I have covered, it tends to be most of them with a few obvious exceptions.

I am thinking about, maybe, identifying on the audit report whether or not the audit is a System Audit or a Compliance Audit.

System Audits would go across ALL cells checking for compliance to 9K2K and a Compliance Audit would be more product/cell based.

Can you split the audits this way ??
I realise that good auditing practice should be to verify your desktop audit against the standard but................

Has anyone got any similar stories to share

Does this make sense??

Regards,

Chris May

[M Greenaway]

I know where you are coming from Chris.

I have a similar problem at the company I recently joined. They traditionally audited processes for compliance to a single procedure, not the 'proper' internal systems audits.

Like you I have re-defined these traditional audits as 'process audits' (note - not process in the ISO9001:2000 sense), and will be conducting systems audits myself.