• Currently only salaried staff are internal auditors which due to scheduling conflicts can make it difficult to have audits completed and on time.
• The audit team has been smaller than I’d like and people end up auditing quite frequently (not necessarily a bad thing) which in this case cuts down on the quality of the audits because they “rush” to get the audits completed because they have so much other work to do.
• At times I find that the auditors end up auditing the same procedures/sections too often – not enough variety when taking into account that auditors must be impartial and cannot audit an area relating to their own job functions.
• We’d like to diversify the audit team to include employees from all sections of the business (Quality, Engineering, Finance, HR, Administration, SQE’s, Purchasing and Production)
• This will also give production employees a chance to gain a better understanding of QMS’ and how this relates to them in their job fuction as well as how all departments are inter-linked. As well, they can learn more about our business which can also help bridge the gap sometimes felt between production and upper management.
The internal auditors (including production employees) will complete quality system audits, manufacturing process audits and product audits.
The candidates will be interviewed by, Human Resources and members of plant management and myself. The operations manager will review the list to rule out anyone who may have “ulterior motives” and negative work histories.
The auditors will have specific TS 16949 and core tools training. Once the training is complete, new auditors will be “buddied” with experienced auditors to ease them into the audit process.
Any thoughts??
Just a few............and they affect audit management and planning, not the auditors......:mg:
If your audits focus on aspects of the system which are 'management issues' e.g poorly performing parts of the process etc., why would there be difficulty in scheduling them? If it's on management's radar, they'll make time for their people to do the audit.
How much time is spent doing these audits, typically? Hours, days? What?
How do you choose a 'scope' or what to audit? If auditors are going over the same ground again and again, then why not find out why, then fix that! Did they prepare and plan not to do this? Did you organize the audits and coach them to prevent it happening?
If the audits are directed to look into the qms and find out why things aren't performing properly etc. then it's unlikely that the same ground will be plowed over.
Using an audit to train people on the use of the qms is a waste of an audit. Better that management train their people and use this to bridge the gap. Anyone who's learning the system while they audit won't return a good result, IMHO.
But I do like the idea that you buddy the newbies up with the experienced folks.........
These comments are to help discover why audits don't give good results. Putting more (new) auditors in the firing line won't help you get different results unless you change something about the way audits are managed......
Andy