Re: Internal Audit
Our spec says that we have to perform internal audit at least once every year or as needed. Customers are visiting as rampantly and they also performing an audit to the company's quality system.
My concern is that, can we omit the usual internal audit since we were been audited by our customers? In this regard, how are we going to show to the third party auditors that we omit the traditional internal audit?
I wouldn't necessarily be against using customer audits as a
part of your audit program (definitely not all), because it makes no sense to duplicate effort. But only on some strong provisos:
* the customer's auditors need to be suitably competent & knowledgeable in your system
* at your end, you (Audit Manager, whoever) needs to review the contents & findings & be satisfied that it covers the substance of the planned audit
* obviously, follow-up of actions.
I also wonder WHY you would have lots of customer audits? Currently I have an international client who's in a similar situation - lots of different customers wanting to audit them. Problems include: the various audits aren't consistent, don't seem to be good at auditing (not competent?),often get hold of quite the wrong end of the stick, often aren't properly briefed, let alone co-ordinated, and in fact have generated a lot of extra work for the client, who's now put a stop to it.
Audits coming from our customers shows an affirmative result
The purpose of audit isn't to seek 'affirmative' results. It's to work out whether your system is following planned arrangements, meets requirements, & is effectively maintained & implemented. Do your customer audits do
all this? Or do they just focus (as is likely) on the particular bits of interest to them?
One of the purposes of ISO 9001 is having an external party (one) audit you. Seems a trifle counter-productive to me to have lots of external parties coming in.