5 steps you need to follow to make a correct ISO 9001 internal audit

At Full Audits we believe that in order to achieve changes that give benefits, you must first have a “vision from the outside”, which allows you to carefully see each process of the organization and thus identify which areas can be improved, and have a correct quality management.

And to achieve that, it is necessary to carry out a correct internal audit, only this way you’ll achieve the overall efficiency of your business.

But what do we mean by quality management?

In simple words we can say that they are tasks that, if well coordinated, serve to lead and control an organization, in order to obtain quality standards that differentiate it from other organizations.

Surely you have already heard about ISO standards. In this case we will focus on the ISO 9001 standard, which is the most recognized quality management standard worldwide. This helps organizations to meet the expectations and needs of customers, continuously controlling the quality of all processes, to achieve a consistent, efficient and profitable result and service.If you want your company to stand out from the rest, you have to take into account these 5 steps to carry out an ISO 9001 internal audit.

1.  Schedule.

Organization and planning is paramount in any process, so we recommend preparing a schedule or creating an audit calendar.

This way we will be able to know when to carry out the audit of each sector, and have a guiding thread to follow in the process.

Having a good organization will create confidence in the each sector employees. Nobody likes a surprise evaluation, right?

If there is no planning and the audit is done without prior agreement, the message given by the management would be “We don’t trust our employees”.

With scheduling, employees will help, with those in charge of the process, to apply improvements over time and to collect information that may be useful for the audit.

With Full Audits, this step becomes very simple, since the app allows you to create different auditing plans, with various checklists to which you can assign different priorities, and thus be able to follow up with automated reports.

2. Plan the scope that we want from this audit.

Not all internal audits are general. Some will be from particular areas or processes. By defining the scope of the audit, it will be possible to avoid spending resources unnecessarily, since time and money will not be wasted in evaluating tasks that will not be taken into account later.

3. Carry out the audit with the appropriate staff.

As we have said before, for any audit it is necessary to organize and plan how it will be done. The same importance must be given to the auditor.The auditor must know how to gather the information needed. You can use different ways, such as reviewing previous records, talking to staff, analyzing data from the process, or direct observation.For an audit to be truly effective, it is necessary for the auditor not to focus only on the things that are not working well, but also to point which areas of the process are working well, but could work even better.·      In this case, Full Audits offers a huge advantage, and we will tell you why:Using this software, it’s not necessary for the person performing the audit to be qualified as an auditor. It is not necessary to have technical training, nor to know server configurations.Through any device, it is possible to build your own and personalized checklist, which helps collecting the necessary information. As all the information is in the system, everyone who has access can be aware of the incidents created.The system, then, will create automated reports, which will help you save time and eliminate the use of paper.

4. Analyze and report the results obtained

Once the review has been completed and the data on the process being audited has been collected, it is necessary to analyze the situation of the sectors and know how to communicate the information obtained.It is important that the process owner is aware of the areas that present problems or can be improved.

What does Full Audits offer for this step?

With the app, the reports, in addition to being automated, will have all the information needed to start monitoring the processes.It will help you identify points for improvement and determine their frequency so that you can then work on the source cause analysis and solve them definitively.In the Dashboard section you can see everything that’s happening in the company. There, you will be able to know about the status of incidents, according to location, by date, by priority, the reason of them, which ones have been resolved and which ones haven’t.It also has a history section where all the modifications made to each incident with the date of the change and the person responsible are saved.

5.    Follow up on problems or improvements found.It is the most critical step when performing an internal ISO 9001 Quality audit.At this point, it will be time to take corrective action, but this does not end here. You have to be completely sure that the problem is completely solved.In the app you will find an Incident Resolution section where you can verify how the incident resolution is carried out so that it can help in the future. If you are interested in raising the quality standards of your company, and you are thinking of doing an audit, we recommend that you visit our website. There you will find more information that will be very useful.