Your Internal Auditing Process, Does It Hurt Or Help Continuous Improvement?
A Quality audit is the process of organized inspection of a quality management system carried out by an internal or external quality auditor or an audit team. It is an important part of organization’s quality management system and is a key element in the ISO quality system standard, ISO 9001.
Quality audits are typically performed at predefined time intervals and ensure that the institution has clearly-defined internal quality monitoring procedures linked to effective corrective and preventive actions. This can help determine if the organization complies with the defined quality system processes and can involve procedural or results-based assessment criteria.
With the upgrade of the ISO9000 series of standards from the 1994 to 2008 series, the focus of the audits has shifted from purely procedural adherence towards a process approach of the actual effectiveness of the Quality Management System and the results that have been achieved through the implementation of a QMS.
Audits are an essential management tool to be used for verifying objective evidence of processes, to assess how successfully processes have been implemented, for judging the effectiveness of achieving any defined objectives, to provide evidence concerning reduction and elimination of problem areas. For the benefit of the organization, quality auditing should not only report non-conformances and corrective actions, but also highlight areas of good practice. In this way other departments may share information and amend their working practices as a result, also contributing to continual improvement.
Internal audits should always be performed with the intension of improving the overall systems being audited, never as a fault finding or witch hunt practice designed to punish. If internal audits are properly executed with a spirit of open communication and real process improvement, this process can be the single most important driver for continual improvement. Done wrong, the internal quality audit processes can create a culture of fear which will hinder continual improvement. It is important that everyone within the organization clearly understands the objectives of quality auditing and their role in them.
