AUDIT MANAGEMENT: Fundamentals That You Should Know!

Quality audit is an indispensable tool to measure the effectiveness of a quality management system implemented in the organization. It helps identify and eliminate the system inconsistencies that could lead to nonconformances, noncompliance, defects, deviations, and product recalls. Furthermore, you can save a significant amount of money, time, and resources.

If you are a quality manager, you might understand the significance of audits to drive continuous improvements and foster a culture of quality within the organization. The systematic investigation of how successfully your quality processes, procedures, and policies are implemented helps you focus on problem areas and achieve quality objectives more efficiently than before.

Despite being an integral part of a quality management system, many enterprises overlook audits. They consider audits as a lengthy and costly exercise. It is usually at this point that they give up trying to achieve operational excellence. 

Why It Is Important to Perform Audits?

As already discussed above, audits help organizations to improve continuously.

But there is much more value that audits drive. Audits help assess and verify the processes, systems, and products’ quality in accordance with applicable regulatory standards to identify non-conformance, process issues, and corrective actions.

Properly documented and maintained, audit reports often demonstrate your organization’s commitment to quality and best practices. You can share audit information across all the departments and business units to ensure consistency.

Therefore, audit enables organizations to:

• Assess the effectiveness of internal process controls.
• Promote best practices throughout the organization.
• Achieve compliance with regulatory standards.
• Identify and eliminate operational inefficiencies to reduce waste.
• Review IT initiatives, systems, and technologies.
• Providing valuable insights for improved decision-making.
• Assess resource utilization practices.
• Identify cost-saving opportunities.
• Assist management in resolving cross-functional issues.

Related Article: A Quick Overview of ISO 19011:2018 Guidelines for Audit Management Systems

What Are Different Types of Audits?

Primarily, there are three types of audits including.

1. Process Audits
2. Product Audits
3. System Audits

Process audits are designed to verify the effectiveness of the business’s processes against the specified requirements. It also includes examining the effectiveness of the process controls as defined in work instructions, flowcharts, and other controlled documents. These audits prepare organizations to succeed by improving continuously and developing a culture of quality.

Product audits are specifically designed to examine a product’s conformance against the specifications, customer requirements, and applicable performance standards. These audits help maintain consistent quality products, eventually helping companies to gain customer confidence and loyalty.

System audits are specifically designed to examine the effectiveness of the quality management system implemented in the organization. It evaluates the objective evidence and quality records documented and maintained in the organization.

How to Perform Audits Effectively?

The audits play a vital role in quality management. Here is how can you put them into practice effectively;

• Provide thorough training to your employees. As a first step, make sure your team is well versed in quality and auditing practices. It requires proper training initiatives. You will be halfway there if you train your team on standard operating procedures, policies, and procedures. You can utilize a cloud-based training management software solution to design and provide flexible training programs for your employees.
• Ensure that your managers put quality first. The management and supervisory staff are crucial in maintaining consistency in product quality, safety, and reliability. Quality standards should be a priority for them, and they should foster a culture of quality. They can continuously perform the audits regularly to evaluate their teams’ performance and ensure that all quality policies are being followed.
• Invest in the right tools. Your staff will not be able to perform audits efficiently using a paper-based auditing system, nor will it provide traceability and visibility of the information required for decision making. It is better to use a cloud-based system like Qualityze Audit Management, which allows you to track, monitor, and eliminate inconsistencies. Your staff will be more likely to audit if it is easier to do so.
• Consistency is key. You will come across discrepancies if you only apply the rules half of the time or use different measurement methods every time you conduct an audit. Be as consistent as possible when evaluating the product or process quality.
• Find out what went wrong. The auditing process can occasionally fail, either because of a human error or disconnected information systems. You should perform a critical analysis to figure out what went wrong—and make significant improvements accordingly.

5 Common Audit Management Challenges That Enterprises Face

The five common challenges that enterprises face with quality management include:

1. The audit processes and systems are not connected with the quality systems, making it difficult for them to trace the audit data and records from previous years.
2. The audit checklists are either paper-based or are not customizable. It increases the chances of missing out on essential requirements. You cannot change the checklist elements easily.
3. The audit processes are time-consuming. They could take enough time from the employees’ productive hours.
4. The audit reports are not insightful, hence keeps you from making informed and better business decisions to implement corrective action or a procedural change.
5. The traditional audit checklist comprises of unnecessary elements that are no longer required.

How to Overcome Audit Management Challenges?

One of the best ways to overcome the audit management challenges is to upgrade to a next-generation audit management system that can help streamline end-to-end audit-related processes while maintaining compliance.

You can easily find effective, cloud-based audit management solutions that come with an easy-to-customize, pre-defined audit checklist to make auditing product and process quality simpler and efficient. The cloud platform also provides flexibility to your auditing team for conducting organization-wide audits without any traceability issues.

The innovative tools for audit management also comprise advanced reporting and dashboard capabilities. Also, the new-age software solutions come with integration capability to connect with your existing business applications and give your better control of quality records. You can quickly and easily generate audit reports from any required timeframe to make improved decisions on implementing the corrective actions or processing a long-due change.

All in all, an audit management software solution is the one-stop solution to overcome all the traditional and common audit management challenges.

Lacking Time to Search from Scratch?

You may not have enough time to scroll through a variety of audit management solutions available online.

Guess What?

We have a quick recommendation for you!

It is Qualityze Audit Management Solution.

Qualityze Audit Management manages compliance and risk with end-to-end process management of internal and external audits. Qualityze Audit Management enables organizations to:

• Implement Industry Best-Practice Audit processes
• Improve Audit Efficiency and Reduce Cost
• Effectively Manage Audit Findings 
• Enhance Visibility of Audit Results
• Drive Continuous Process Improvement

Effective and timely audits improve product quality and safety while ensuring compliance throughout the supply chain.  Qualityze Audit Management’s configurable workflow streamlines the audit lifecycle, allowing auditors to create, schedule, and perform audits more quickly than ever before.

You can leverage the exclusive features, intuitive user interface, and capabilities such as digital signature, audit trail, audit calendar, pre-defined checklists, audit scheduler, offline capability, and much more with Qualityze.

If you want to experience Qualityze difference in managing quality audits, you can contact us on 1-877-207-8616 or write to us at info@qualityze.com, and our customer success team will be right there for you.