Cement Production Process Audit

[maymay14]

Dear Cove users,

I am currently given the job to audit the cement production process, which I do not where to start or which questions to ask the company does have ISO 9000, but I am expected to go beyond ISO. And look at the profits, misfits, any sort of distortions and so on.

Is there any suggestions?

 

[RoxaneB]

Maymay14 - Without knowing what requirements (be it ISO 9001 or your organization's internal processes for revenue, strategy, etc.), it's difficult to conduct an assessment. You could, I suppose, look for consistency in practices (i.e., people do the same thing, regardless if it is in production or billing), but that doesn't help you identify if they are doing the CORRECT activity.

Still, having defined practices to follow will help you establish what you can look for during the assessment.

Then there are the metrics or performance indicators. Do they have metrics that help determine that the process is working well? Are they consistently applied and known? Is there a target/goal? Are they hitting the target? Do they have a positive trend?

Plotting conformance to practices and conformance to criteria for the metrics can help determine where the process "scores" and facilitate discussions about improvement.

 

[maymay14]

Thanks RoxaneB, this gave me an idea on where to start. Let's see where it will take me!

 

[howste]

Dear Cove users,

I am currently given the job to audit the cement production process, which I do not where to start or which questions to ask the company does have ISO 9000, but I am expected to go beyond ISO. And look at the profits, misfits, any sort of distortions and so on.

Is there any suggestions?

Go back to the definition of audit in ISO 9000:

Systematic, independent and documented process for obtaining objective evidence and evaluating it objectively to determine the extent to which the audit criteria are fulfilled.

It seems to me that whoever assigned you to do the audit didn't clearly define the audit criteria. The term "audit criteria" is defined as:

Set of policies, procedures, or requirements used as a reference against which objective evidence is compared.

If I were doing the audit, I would go back to whoever assigned me to do the audit and ask what policies, procedures, and/or requirements they need me to audit against. If you don't get these defined up front, how can the audit possibly be successful?