Internal Audits are like 'preventive maintenance' for your management system
By being proactive instead of reactive, you will reduce costly errors that eat up resources to fix. It never seems like it takes all that much time to fix a small problem, but the person fixing it is not doing what you're paying them for. And if 'sales' has to get involved, think of all that lost revenue that's not being generated while another problem is getting taken care of.
Can people be trained to do better audits?
You bet! Our training sessions are designed using your Internal Audit procedure. We make sure all the useful clauses in ISO 19011 have been taken advantage of first. Then we flowchart your business lines from the inside out (end-to-end from the customer's perpective) and plan the audit to follow the work flow. Finally (and most importantly) we change the philosophy of auditing from 'assess conformance' to 'find ways to improve our processes'. This has many advantages:
- helps you discover 'cracks' in the workflow that don't show up when you audit by sinlge processes or the ISO clauses
- changes the focus from 'hide this from the ISO cops' to one of 'maybe they really are trying to make the work flow better
- creates an opportunity for the person who knows the most about the process to explain how they would improve it
- helps find hidden waste, the #1 budget killer
Training sessions include practice audits
The only way to truly assess the effectivenss of any training is to test the methods taught. On-site training includes a 1/2 day practice audit (with our instructor coaching) to make sure the core competencies have been addressed. If the concept of 'look for ways to improve our processes' is new to your organization, this can be practised as well. Attitudes take a while to change, but seeing is believing and your employees will see this approach at work. Once your organization demonstrates support for 'improving the process' and change actually takes place, the cycle is complete.