Know your auditor
Before hosting an audit, always be sure to know your audience. Audits can be performed by customers, government regulators, notified bodies or your own staff. Understanding each persona and their requirements will help you better prepare for an audit.
Decide if a remote audit is acceptable or if an onsite audit is necessary
Certain circumstances outside of your control can lead to travel restrictions that disrupt traditional audit processes. If you can’t organize an on-site audit for any reason, use risk management tools to limit your scope, create detailed and prescriptive agendas
and use video conferencing tools to maintain audit integrity. The right combination of creativity, planning and technology can make remote audits as successful as traditional ones.
Conduct a pre-audit walkthrough
Walk through the facilities that are being audited the way an auditor would. Look at all the equipment
labels. Check documentation that is in use and ensure everything is in its proper place. Then, contact key supervisors to address any issues that could impact the audit.
Refine the audit scope with risk management
Use as much data as possible to conduct a risk assessment and determine what truly needs to be audited internally. If you have supplier corrective action requests (SCAR), you may be able to limit your scope to information related only to the processes impacted by these corrective action requests.
Prioritizing internal audits based on high-volume,
high-risk or especially complex products can increase efficiency.
Train all participants ahead of time
If the audit you’re hosting will include multiple participants, design a standard training on best practices for audit preparation, including approaches for answering audit questions, interacting with an auditor professionally and explaining technical topics to non-technical auditors.
Know your weaknesses
Even the best organizations have weak areas. You can choose to openly address yours with an auditor at the opening meeting. Or, you can keep high-risk areas outside of an auditor’s path with careful planning.
Why ETQ Reliance for Audit Management?
ETQ has created a complete solution that helps you stay audit-ready throughout the year. Manage and track your audits. Create configured workflows and audit profiles and keep all the components of your audit management system in one centralized location. Conduct scheduled audits or ad-hoc audits in-person or remotely. Add questions or checklists and choose from variable scoring options.
The Audit Management application of ETQ Reliance is configurable to your processes and easy to manage and track. It enables you to build a comprehensive audit management plan while providing complete visibility into the overall health and effectiveness of your QMS or EHS system.
With ETQ Reliance Audit Management, you’re able to fulfill three functions critical to successful quality audits whether they’re conducted on-site or remotely.
Build multiple external, internal and customer or supplier audit types
ETQ Reliance Audit Management comes with various types of audits pre-built to give you the flexibility to categorize and configure plans based on your specific requirements.
Standardize audit management
Create audit templates with standard language, reporting options and scoring methods. For each audit, you can ensure that the method, layout and approach are standard to your operating procedures.
Report and act
ETQ Reliance is built with comprehensive reporting on findings that can be charted, reviewed and acted on. Launch corrective actions, change management activities or execute other action items directly from the audit record.
Features:
- Create or import check- lists for many audit types
- Create any number of question profiles and link to any checklist
- Fully configure question types and notes
- Link audit management findings directly to corrective actions
- Plan audits for an entire year or more
- Configure workflows to automate review and approval processes
- Automatically assign audits once they’re scheduled
- Generate audit reporting with completion status and related action items
- Perform risk assessments on audits using multiple risk parameters
“ETQ has been a smashing success for our end users at Fujifilm. We continue to load new users and their documents daily and they love it.”—Donna McCracken, FUJIFILM
