Due to the great recognition that ISO certifications have gained over the years, internal quality audits have also been gaining prominence in the processes of organizations.
What is the ISO 9001 standard?
The ISO 9001 international standard aims to achieve high levels of quality in organizations through a quality management system.
The established requirements by the ISO 9001 standard focus on meeting customer needs. Organizations must carry out the necessary processes to ensure that their products and services meet customer requirements.
If you want to know more about audits, we invite you to read our article What are audits and what is their function in an organization?
They can be carried out by the company’s internal team, duly trained to carry them out, or hire an external team for the procedure.
Tools such as Full Audits simplify the process of carrying out the audit, since it can integrate the entire team on the same platform and synchronize the quality team with the rest of the company’s areas.
Everything that is generated and worked on is integrated in one place, a single reliable tool that is updated in real time as the team completes its work.
Try our free demo to perform your internal audit and start optimizing your business processes.
We already know what an internal audit consists of and how it is carried out, now…
What are the benefits it provides to your company?
- It allows us to know the adequacy to the norm
By carrying out an internal audit with your work team, you will be able to find out if all the areas of the organization are in line with the company’s current quality management system according to the requirements of the ISO 9001 standard.
Not only will you be able to know if the areas are adapted to the system, but you will also be able to recognize if there are errors that are preventing the optimization of resources and identify existing failures in different processes.
- Update the quality management system
Carrying out an internal audit on a cyclical basis allows us to keep the quality management system continuously updated. - Improve communication with collaborators
In each internal audit process, the company’s workers are listened to, in order to find out their opinions on the processes or listen to their versions of possible incidents. This way, internal communication is improved, since it encourages staff to be informed about both their activities and those of the rest.
- Application of improvement proposals
When carrying out internal audit, various proposals arise to detect points of improvement and be able to solve them as a team. Those responsible for the organization can make decisions based on the situation reflected in the audit, to make modifications towards the planned goals, if the processes are deviating from them. This way, corrective and preventive actions are proposed to correct the non-conformities detected.
- Control of corrective actions
The following internal audits allow diagnosing whether the corrective and preventive actions proposed to optimize the processes have been carried out effectively. - Promotes continuous improvement
By eliminating risks and failures thanks to the proposed corrective actions.
- Facilitates obtaining certification
If we carry out internal audits periodically within the organization, it will be easier and faster to obtain the standard certification.
Today there is still a large percentage of organizations that see audits as a requirement, without being able to see the benefits that the application brings to the quality management system.
However, we have already seen that the implementation and review of internal audits add great value to the quality management processes of companies.
With Full Audits, you can perform audits with automated reports, saving time and eliminating the use of paper.
It can also be used with or without an internet connection, which allows you to run audits in remote locations and then synchronize the audit in the cloud when an internet connection is available.
Be sure to carry out these types of audits in your organization and begin to benefit from all the advantages that they will provide to your quality management system.