Can our Consultant be our Internal auditor? If not can his colleague be one?

[CliffK]

Re: The internal auditor can't be the same with the consultant, does it refer to ?

Hello teo_teo,

Yes, your consultant can perform internal audits on your behalf.
Yes, the consultant can represent you "in front of the CB" .

Stijloor.

The first point has always been true.

The second point has always been true also, but certain registrars and/or auditors have tried to restrict consultant participation in the past. Some still might. If you are thinking about going this route, prudence suggests asking any potential registrar about their policy regarding consultant participation.

 

[Stijloor]

Re: The internal auditor can't be the same with the consultant, does it refer to ?

The first point has always been true.

The second point has always been true also, but certain registrars and/or auditors have tried to restrict consultant participation in the past. Some still might. If you are thinking about going this route, prudence suggests asking any potential registrar about their policy regarding consultant participation.

That's true. Automotive suppliers (per the "Rules 2nd Ed.") are not permitted to have their consultant(s) present during the audit.

 

[teo_teo]

What do you mean by "the entire MS can be outsourced"? Can they take the registration audit for us? Can they do everything? What would be left for us to do? It may be easier this way.. hmm

 

[CliffK]

What do you mean by "the entire MS can be outsourced"? Can they take the registration audit for us? Can they do everything? What would be left for us to do? It may be easier this way.. hmm

I don't see how you can outsource management commitment - clause 5.

Many auditors want a one-on-one session with top management, at least during the initial registration audit.

I would expect a lot of scrutiny on the organization's method of controlling the supplier of the service.

The management rep must be a "member of management," but in an age where organizations outsource their Chief Financial Officer, I imagine this isn't a real barrier, especially to a clever service provider.

 

[Icy Mountain]

We had a consultant assist us with our QMS implementation. His company is ISO9001 registered to provided this service and internal auditing service.

He has learned our company inside and out while also acting as an expert mediator when "the way we want do things" ran afoul of "a compliant way to do things". And before you cry foul about not doing things just to satisfy the standard, we did have some serious questions along the lines of "Why do we have to show traceable calibration for that meter, it's made by Fluke?"

Said consultant has far more training in Internal Audit, is a much more unbiased observer and prepares better audit records than any of us folks who "have other jobs" could ever hope the achieve. As a contract employee, staffing our internal audit function, we believe that he provides a more valuable data for improvement than we could achieve on our own. Since the only work he does is internal audit, he audits our entire system and the internal audit is reviewed and audited at Management Review.

BTW, we run our QMS and are fully capable of going through a third party audits without assistance from a consultant. As a contract employee, staffing the internal audit function, he is available (and acceptable to our third party auditor) to answer questions about internal audit. His work is so good that we've never had a finding in internal audit and we've only talked to him once during third party audit and then only because the lead auditor wanted to make sure that he talked to everyone on the team and compliment him on his work.