Time to Rethink the Checklist Audit

Optimizing company resources with a process approach to auditing

Organizations today face unprecedented challenges to increase productivity and performance. Having an effective internal audit system is an important tool that allows organizations to determine where key strengths and weaknesses exist within their processes. Once identified they can build on their strengths and allocate resources to improve the weaknesses.

However, many organizations have limited resources yet must still find ways to perform effective audits. Organizations with multiple management systems (e.g., quality and environmental) may discover that their internal audits are utilizing too many resources or they’re simply not providing the necessary value. In some cases the internal audit program may concentrate more on one standard than the other depending on the auditor’s background and experience. Organizations are facing considerable competition and price sensitivity in today’s economy. They must find smarter and more efficient ways to manage and glean the value from their audit processes.

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Comments

Time To Rethink the Checklist Audit????

I would be VERY careful with a process audit approach in leue of a checklist. The process approach requires much more up front time, requires a higher level of auditor skill, and true may save time while auditing, may not be as comprehensive as a well thought out checklist.

We went to a process based audit approach 3-5 years ago and have just converted back to a checklist approach. Why... the process approach audit did not reveal or unveil as many system issues or areas for improvement. In addition, our customer conducted audits of us as a supplier using audit checklists and were able to find areas for improvement we missed with a process based approach to auditing... While both process and checklist approaches can be effective if done right... the customer audits in a general sense seem to actually favor a audit checklist versus a process approach to auditing.

Ken Kaniecki

Time To Rethink the Checklist Audit

Really useful information about Audit Checklist

http://www.iasiso.com/iso-audit-procedure.html

And the interactions between them

After several rounds of auditing the processes in a new system for a start-up company, I started finding that the real value was determining the interactions between key processes and auditing them for effectiveness. So often I found that the light bulb and the switch worked fine, but the wiring between them was broken!