Average number of Nonconformances during a surveillance assessment

[Paul Simpson]

Not another disagreement with Sid - I must be mad!

Obviously, the number of NC's does not tell the whole story. But there is anecdotal evidence that contracted auditors (vs. full time employee auditors) write fewer NC's, compared to the fully employed counterparts. The primary reason is the fact that auditors realize that, if they upset the paying customers, they might not be welcomed back.

As both full time and contract auditor myself in a previous lives (?) and now managing a pool of contract auditors I can only say it depends on the individual. Contract auditors tend to be sensitive to the impact of the NC with the client as they have been (and sometimes still are) on both sides of the great audit divide - we encourage our auditor to apply the "Peacock" test to NCs (named after a good colleague still working at BSi) - and that is to write out the NC in rough (before commiting it to the report) and saying "So what?" afterwards and if you can't think of a good answer to the "So what?" then throw the piece of paper in the bin without raising it as an NC.

By contrast I have shared a room with a group of full time auditors as they share experience of non compliances to "get" the client on. Thankfully less prevalent now!

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that all contracted auditors are bad and all full time auditors are good. Not at all. I personally know several contract auditors that are extremely good at what they do. But being black listed from a client has obvious different consequence$ for the two categories. After all, contrary to what many believe, the pocket is the most sensitive part of the human anatomy.

There might be a short term leaning to avoid the risk of being rejected by the client but we try to put the message across clearly that they are not there to find NCs that add no value but they are there to assess the effectiveness of management systems and we will stand behind them if the NC is valid.

If we have to take them off a job because the client is set against them then we find them another job to replace it.

 

[Randy]

I've seen over 100 miners during an assessment....Of course they were digging bauxite

 

[Cari Spears]

Re: Not another disagreement with Sid - I must be mad!

- we encourage our auditor ... to write out the NC in rough (before commiting it to the report) and saying "So what?" afterwards and if you can't think of a good answer to the "So what?" then throw the piece of paper in the bin without raising it as an NC.

That is an excellent litmus test.

 

[Sidney Vianna]

Litmus test for an NC.

That is an excellent litmus test.

Yes, it is. Remember that the Auditing Practices Group has a similar advice for auditors. The appropriate links to the documents were posted here.

 

[fireonce]

Re: Just like Mrs. Thatcher.........

Our last TS surveillance audit was in Oct. and we got 2 minors.

 

[Dean Frederickson]

Our 1st surveillance audit 8 minors. Approx. 100 people.

 

[somerqc]

Maybe I am lucky, I haven't had any findings yet (2 years).

Some of this is due to the fact that I tend to be very through for my internal audits therefore creating situation where we just corrected or are in the process of correcting a process (re: I found it before they did).

The rest is that I use Management Review and Customer Feedback as powerful tools to resolve issues before they become issues (i.e. preventative actions or corrective actions that are less effort to implement than otherwise may occur).

Having said this my next surveillance audit (Jan 09) will likely result in a finding as top management is one of the items on the grill.

Just my

 

[Stijloor]

Our 1st surveillance audit 8 minors. Approx. 100 people.

Dean,

A few questions if I may....

• Were those 8 minors "fair" nonconformities in your opinion?
• If so, would your internal auditors been able to find those prior to the surveillance audit?

I am curious because I have observed this on a few occasions...

Thanks Dean.

Stijloor.

 

[Barahir]

We've not had any surveillance audits yet for TS, having completed our upgrade audit just over 1 month ago. At that, our auditor found 4 minor NC's and about the same number of OFI's.

When we were QS (this company first went QS in October '98, I started a week before our first surveillance audit in October '99 and then we moved to every 6 months until October 2005 which was our last QS audit), the number of NC's gradually declined as time went on. In 1999 and 2000 we were probably getting 4 or 5 per audit, and by 2004 and 2005 we would get 1 (and on one lone occasion, none).

Looking back at that post, the last two years have been quite a bit different for us. Our first surveillance audit saw 0 nonconformances, which resulted in the owner of the company believing that the audit was being pencil-whipped (we were seeing an upswing in product failures at the same time which I think might have been tied to poor performance from personnel and management rather then effectivness of the QMS), fired that registrar and moved us to another one. On the registration audit with the new registrar they found 9 minor nonconformances, only 1 of which was questionable. On the first surveillance audit from the new registrar we were down to 2 minors.

So my completely anecdotal data points tell me that there is a significant auditor-to-auditor variation in what is or isn't considered acceptable, which is not very suprising given the subjective nature of the beast.

 

[Dean Frederickson]

Dean,

A few questions if I may....

• Were those 8 minors "fair" nonconformities in your opinion?
• If so, would your internal auditors been able to find those prior to the surveillance audit?

I am curious because I have observed this on a few occasions...

Thanks Dean.

Stijloor.

Long answer short, yes they were fair. Should we have found them during I.A. yes a couple of them should have been found, the others I am not so sure we would have noted them because the time (money) involved in fixing them would not be cost effective. Whats important/critical to the external auditor is not always so with us.