Please review my ISO 9001:2015 Internal Audit Plan

[Lyubomyr]

Hello everyone,

First of all, I would like to say that I have found this Forum to be a very helpful source of peer-to-peer learning and would like to thank everyone for sharing their knowledge and experience. Hopefully, as I gain experience and knowledge in the Quality field I will be able to contribute as well.

I am currently working on revising my ISO 9001:2015 Internal Audit Plan and Schedule to the process approach.
However, by having no prior experience in Quality Management I would like to hear your input.
I’ve attached the old version of Internal Audit and the new version for your review.
Any suggestions or comments will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

 

[RCH2016]

It looks good to me. Just remember that it needs some flexibility built in. For instance we have lines that go down and can stay down for a week or two, so trying to audit them on a strict schedule would be unreasonable.

 

[AndyN]

Hello everyone,

First of all, I would like to say that I have found this Forum to be a very helpful source of peer-to-peer learning and would like to thank everyone for sharing their knowledge and experience. Hopefully, as I gain experience and knowledge in the Quality field I will be able to contribute as well.

I am currently working on revising my ISO 9001:2015 Internal Audit Plan and Schedule to the process approach.
However, by having no prior experience in Quality Management I would like to hear your input.
I’ve attached the old version of Internal Audit and the new version for your review.
Any suggestions or comments will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Hello and welcome!

Anyone here can tell you anything they want to, but that's missing the point. We know nothing about your organization so our responses are all going to miss the point (except for mine, of course).

My responses are:

Why are you doing this?
What do your management think, since they are the "customers" of your audit program
Is there anything on here which addresses any business related issues? Like squeaky wheels, what is distracting your management?
Why did you choose this frequency/time frame?
What is the objective of the audit program and each audit?
Are you prepared to feed this monster?

 

[dsheaffe]

Hi, I have to agree with AndyN that while we can provide feedback on your plan in general - whether it is appropriate for your business is really something that you and your management need to decide.

Having said that, a couple of general comments. Having a matrix of processes and clauses I think is not a bad thing, although is probably only adding value to you as the "quality' guy and your external auditors so that you can quickly check to see that all clauses are being covered somewhere - and what clauses are relevant to each process.

As for the frequency of audits - and this is definitely something that I can't answer with any authority without knowing anything about your business and where your issues/risks are - but from an outsiders point of view (again without any knowledge of your business) only auditing a process every 2 years appears to be on the light side. (Of course it could be that you have assessed your risks and the results of previous audits, etc and decided the Scheduling, Purchasing only needs to be audited every 2 years).

 

[AndyN]

Here's some things to consider when putting together an audit programme (that's NOT a calendar) which is simply a number of audits:

You don't have to plan 3 years in advance. It's impossible to make any sense of trying to do that. No-one can predict that far into the future.

Consider why you are doing audits. What's the purpose of doing them? When you understand that, and I mean TRULY understand that, then deciding what to audit and when makes more sense.

Don't schedule audits alone. Don't "push" audits on the management. Educate them as to why audits are helpful - once YOU have understood why they are useful. Engage management in planning around things which they believe are important to their process.

Audit things which are "squeaky wheels". Don't plan audits based on "clauses".

Consider the "hard points" in the year when things are predictable - like some kind of seasonal event which may affect processes - like maintenance being done over the Christmas/New Years shut down. Otherwise, use a rolling 30 day window to focus the audits on things which are of significance.

Ask more questions, here...

 

[Lyubomyr]

Thank you everyone for your input. It looks like I do need to ask myself a few more questions and subsequently adjust the Audit Plan.

 

[AndyN]

Don't forget that we can help answer many/most of those questions! Like, "why am I auditing?"...

 

[was named killer]

Looks wicked cumbersome to me. Why do all that work when you don't need to?