On several occasions while conducting a third-party surveillance audit, I’ve gotten the following query--or a variation thereof: “One of our customers called us last week and wants to come in to do an audit in three weeks. Why can’t they just accept the results of the audit that you’re doing? After all, they’re auditing us to the same requirements. Isn’t registration to ISO 9001 supposed to stop these multiple customer audits?”

It does seem to be a dreadful waste of time. When any auditor comes in, there’s the need to have staff available for interviews. There’s at least one individual--usually the quality manager--who loses one or more days escorting the auditor throughout the facility. Schedules are disrupted; important tasks get sidelined.

On top of that wasted time is the frustration that comes from the not unreasonable anticipation that the ISO 9001 certificate should negate the need for all these additional audits. It’s an undeniable fact that part of the intent of conformity assessment is to ensure parity among subscribers to an identified standard. Registration to ISO 9001, or a comparable sector-specific quality management system (QMS), is intended to signify adherence to an impeccable level of quality. The logical conclusion would of course be that if there’s parity, there should be no need for additional assessment.

 …