Avoid These Mistakes When Doing Your Qms Audit
A quality management system (QMS) is more than just the formal framework your company requires to become certified to ISO 9001. It will continuously enhance your operations and is in charge of the practices or procedures that guarantee the quality of your goods or services. Regular quality management system audits can help you identify problems with your quality controls before they impact your final goods or services.
Every business must undergo a QMS audit to maintain certification and enhance their performance. You must know more about the importance of audit as it is essential to ensuring that your QMS fulfills its objectives and is in line with the ISO standard. When carried out properly, it will assist in identifying issues so that you may quickly remedy them.
However, a QMS audit would waste your time and resources and won’t improve your quality controls if carried out improperly. So, how can you properly conduct your iso 9001 QMS audit, and how can you prevent mistakes?
Auditing the Quality Management System: Common Mistakes to Avoid
Conducting the audit without a suitable plan: An internal audit becomes a routine and important procedure to maintain the certification once a QMS has been established and ISO certified. As a result, you shouldn’t execute it haphazardly, that is, without informing the staff prior or setting a suitable time schedule. Additionally, you should consider all the quality controls and business operations that need to be audited.
A thorough audit cannot be carried out without the participation of management, staff, quality managers, and process owners. Without their participation, you risk missing out on some crucial areas that need to be audited to uncover underlying risks and non-conformities.
As a result, you must always create an appropriate plan or roadmap for your audit process. It assists you in carrying out the audit in a coordinated manner, incorporating the key players and focusing on the most significant issues.
Ignoring the part about documentation: You should study the documents in addition to your business’s core areas and quality methods. You have prepared, created, arranged, and kept many records to acquire the certification for your QMS.
The quality objectives, policy, scope of the QMS, staff roles, job instructions, evidence of compliance, and records of quality issues are all presented in detail in these documents. The forms are stored so authorized members can easily access them in paper files or electronic format.
These records are essential for guaranteeing employee accountability and ensuring that your organization’s quality management practices are uniform. Therefore, those documents must also be examined throughout the audit to see if they align with your existing quality methods, objectives, policy, compliance requirements, etc.
Ignoring preventive measures in favor of solely recovery remedies: Finding hazards, flaws, and nonconformities that have decreased the QMS’s effectiveness is the goal of the QMS audit. Unfortunately, many businesses only address these problems after they have already caused damage, i.e., by enhancing the QMS and regaining its effectiveness. Organizations rarely consider taking preventive measures to ensure that those problems never recur.
Therefore, failing to take preventive action while concentrating on problem-solving and damage control will render the audit ineffective. An audit aims to continuously enhance the QMS to ensure consistency in the quality of your goods and services.
Use appropriate remedies, such as altering a procedure or hiring more qualified workers, to solve the problems at their root and prevent them from reoccurring in the future. This approach can use the difficulties found to enhance your QMS.
Key Learnings
These typical quality management system audit errors can quickly lead to the failure of your audit process and a missed opportunity for your company. The best way to avoid these errors is to hire a qualified team of auditors with knowledge of QMSes from various sectors. They know how to make the audit a pleasant experience and a genuine chance for companies to raise the bar on their performance quality.