Planning your ISO 9001 Internal Audit Program
Your internal audit program is one of the key tools, that the ISO 9001 quality management standard requires an organization to use, to determine the effectiveness of its quality management system (QMS). An organization’s QMS effectiveness is measured by its ability to meet its objectives in terms of customer, business and other requirements.
As a process, your Internal Audit program must be controlled no different than other QMS processes. Following the underlying QMS concepts of plan-do-check-act, you must carefully plan, define, implement and control your organization’s internal audit program. Your Internal Audit Program should help you to identify problems, risks, good practices and opportunities to better achieve your goals and enhance customer satisfaction.
So to begin with, senior management must actively support the audit program by providing resources in terms of making personnel available to plan and conduct audits; providing them the requisite training through internal or external means; allowing the workforce the time to respond to audits; communicating to the workforce the importance of this activity; reviewing and taking action on the information provided by internal audit reports.
A number of factors must be considered in planning an effective Internal Audit Program. These include:
• Program goals and objectives
• Audit criteria and scope
• Schedule and frequency
• Auditor training, selection and availability
• Audit strategies and practices
• Audit Plans
• Auditee responsibilities
• Audit reporting
• Audit documents and tools
• Audit sampling
• Communication and interaction
Each of these factors will be discussed at length in upcoming posts. So please bookmark this website and visit often to keep up to date with this topic.
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Tags: internal audit program, internal audit training, iso 9001 2000 audit, ISO 9001 auditors, ISO 9001 internal audit, iso internal auditor training