we are a very small Manufacturing. shop with a lot of "green" employees going through a first time certification audit. There will be one auditor. I feel like I need to give them some good examples of what will possibly take place to better prepare them
Speaking from a 9001 perspective....
You'll want to prepare the employees based on their individual levels of authority and responsibility. Typically a line worker has little to no authority and is responsible just to see that their assigned activity is done. So, for them its providing them things like QMS awareness: do they know who they report to? do they know how to get the assignments for their tasks? do they know where/how to get the correct instructions for that task...and how do they know those are the correct instructions?, what is the company trying to achieve quality-wise - in general terms - not necessarily being able to quote the quality policy verbatim, do they know quality is expected from them? how do they measure/identify/etc. that what they are producing is conforming?) and what do they do if something goes wrong - is there a clear escalation path or procedure to follow? They have no need to know clauses, or cite ISO language - it's management & quality's job to have provided them the tools, processes and training to do their jobs and know how to escalate bad product, broken tools, and other similar exceptions.
People w/more authority & responsibility need to be aware of the scope of what they do. How does the Purchasing Mgr, for example, determine when/where to buy from? How do they handle the need for approving a new vendor?, etc.
I find auditors like to go linearly from initial customer request to buy something to how do you negotiate and set expectations, create and place sales orders, do design work (that's a whole audit big piece in itself if you do design & development), purchase, receive, manufacture, ship, etc. (It depends of course, on the audit type - a surveillance audit will just look at different pieces of the company each year across several years.) But along the way, bring up questions like "what if the product that comes in doesn't match your PO...what is you process for handling that?", "what if the customer changes their order...how does that happen?" They'll be looking to see if people know where to find their process instructions, forms, records, etc. that they use and are responsible for, and do people know what to do if things go wrong.
Then there are the management reviews, corrective actions, risk, training records, etc. that you would typically handle with the auditor.
The auditor's job is to find evidence of
conformity, not to dig and dig until they find that one thing that someone did wrong last year, and then scold you with a big nonconformance. However, N/C's do happen as part of audits, and they have to be taken in stride as being constructively intended (in most cases, at least) as part of the continuous improvement mindset. So, be sure to instill in employees that while they may strive to do well, it's not unusual or unexpected to get N/C's and neither they nor you need to be defensive or mad. In addition, the ISO standard has a lot of leeway for interpretation, so it may be that your interpetation and the auditor's don't line up. The auditor should explain the n/c's clearly, what the relevant clause is, and they may even hint at how it might get corrected. If you do get an n/c that's just wildly incorrect or unfair, you can always appeal the n/c.
