How to Conduct Internal Audit Correctly for ISO 9001 Compliance
Summary:
This article explains the keyways you should conduct your internal audit procedures to achieve compliance with an ISO 9001 standard as quickly as possible.
Internal audit is a necessary practice that helps organisations to review their processes and management systems ensuring that they work in the appropriate way and meet the necessary compliance requirements. It is especially beneficial to conduct in your business because you can identify new opportunities to improve a process or system and enhance your overall efficiency. If you need your organisation to achieve the ISO 9001 certification, an internal audit becomes a far more useful practice. It helps you to find opportunities for improving the competency of your QMS (Quality Management System) as well as verify the compliance with the ISO 9001 requirements. To get the best out of your audit process and audit findings for achieving compliance, this article provides you with some guidelines.
An internal audit can be an overwhelming procedure when you have vast processes, a complex QMS, extensive practices, and policies. Here we have provided some ways to ease your audit procedure and allow it to make your business ISO 9001 compliance ready.
5 Tips on Making Your Internal Audit Effective for ISO 9001 Compliance
1. Thoroughly Review Your Internal Processes
Before the external certification takes place, a self-assessment of your internal processes is necessary to find the inefficient areas or errors in them. It helps you know whether the processes are properly aligned with the QMS and are executed in the way you wanted them to. Secondly, the reviewing helps you to know whether the processes go against any laid down regulations or ISO 9001 quality standard. The audit must be performed at periodic intervals and so you must schedule the audits every 3–6 months before applying for the certification. It helps you to identify any inconsistencies in your processes and find areas or scopes to improve.
2. Get all Essential Documents Ready
Organisations need to be serious with documentation when they are going to achieve an ISO certification. Checking the documents is a vital part of the internal audit process. Through the documents, you should ensure that all the compliance requirements are met by your organisation. Also, the documents present what your work procedures are, how they interact and in what sequence they are executed, what are quality objectives and policies, what are key performance indications (KPIs), how to measure the KPIs, what employees do, and so on. When everything is well-written and established in the documents, it helps running your processes in an organised way and results in regularity in your business. Also, importantly, keeping your documents ready help you to achieve ISO 9001 compliance easily because you could provide evidence to meet the compliance requirements during the external certification audit.
3. Create a Track Record of Your Audits
When all the findings or results of periodic audits are recorded, it helps in improving compliance and gaining certification. The audit trail would help your auditors to recognise what inefficiencies, nonconformities, or issues were identified and resolved. From the trail, you can know whether they are reappearing again and the areas, processes, or QMS procedures that ideally improved with time due to consistent checking and adjusting. Maintaining an audit trail helps in keeping up-to-date records of the inspection activities performed, processes evaluated, when and how, and everything else, so that you can trace back any issue or incident if it has caused any positive/negative impact on the business.
4. Training of Employees Must be a Key Focus
Before conducting internal audits, do not forget to train the employees. With training, you must inform them clearly about the new procedures and policies to follow under the QMS. When they are adequately trained and know how to perform their specific roles, it makes the audit procedure smooth. They can coordinate with the auditors, provide deeper insights into the process, answer their questions correctly, and cooperate at every stage. Therefore, keeping your staff educated and trained to ensure that they can add value to the auditing procedure.
5. Staying Up to Date with Compliance Requirements
Use your internal audit as an opportunity to stay up to date with compliance requirements of the ISO 9001 standard. Every standard goes through revisions and changes after a few years. Thus, when you perform the audit, learn about the latest version of ISO 9001 and check compliance of your organisation against the additional new requirements beside the existing ones.
When you consider performing internal audits periodically in your organisation, you are not just able to ensure compliance and achieve the ISO 9001 certification easily but also able to derive many benefits. You can identify the existing inefficiencies or shortfalls in your QMS next to the compliance gaps. Therefore, you can focus on continuously improving the QMS, reducing uncertainties, and avoiding non-compliance with statutory laws.
Author Bio:
Damon Anderson is the owner of a leading ISO certification consultancy in Australia that assists organisations in widespread industries to get certifications in the most agile and cost-effective manner. He is also a dedicated ISO 9001 certification consultant working for more than 15 years and likes to spend his free time writing about his experiences of ISO 9001 implementation in various businesses over the past years.
Contact Details:
Business Name: Compliancehelp
Email: sales@compliancehelp.com.au
Phone: 1800 503 401
