Issue 132 – How far back in time can an auditor go?
ISO 9001:2015…
How far back in time can an auditor go?
I appreciate receiving emails with questions and/or comments from readers of this Newsletter… please continue to do so since it provides me with ideas on what these publications should cover. In my last Newsletter (ISO 9001:2015 Newsletter Issue 131) we discussed the topic of “What if your Quality Objectives don’t show improvement?”, and now in this Newsletter we will discuss “How far back in time can an auditor go?”.
The ISO 9001:2015 Element numbering…
Element 4 – Context of the organization
Element 5 – Leadership
Element 6 – Planning
Element 7 – Support
Element 8 – Operation
Element 9 – Performance evaluation
Element 10 – Improvement
How far back in time can an auditor go?… One of my Clients received a minor nonconformance (NC) during an external surveillance audit regarding missing information on a training document. This organization has been ISO 9001 certified for many decades and this external auditor has visited this plant at least twice before. This organization also has thousands and thousands of training records and this auditor found just one (1) example of missing information on a training form. That in itself doesn’t justify issuing a minor NC… in fact I doubt it even deserves to be called an Opportunity for Improvement (OFI) since it was such an isolated occurrence. Why would an external auditor bother writing this up as a minor NC?… I suspect they were “looking” for anything that they could put into their audit report… and unfortunately that happens way too often. If you sense that your external auditor is digging around needlessly then I sometimes recommend that you “throw them a bone”… in other words, nonchalantly suggest an OFI that they could write up (…and make sure it’s about something you have either already started to work on… or that you need to work on… regardless of the outcome of the audit). I’ve seen this strategy work successfully multiple times in my past experience.
However this story doesn’t end here because what I didn’t mention was that this one (1) training form (with missing information), out of thousands and thousands of training forms, was from 1990… yes, you read that right… in fact it was 5 years BEFORE they even got ISO certified in 1995. Eventually my Client was able to find the “Grandfather-Clause” that I had them insert into their Quality Manual way back in those early years that essentially states that “any employee, as of a certain date, are hereby considered to be trained/qualified in that job, without having any supporting documentation”… and that’s what my Client sent back to the ISO Certification Body in response to their minor NC. What a waste of everyone’s time!
So let me answer the question in the title of this Newsletter?… It’s common practice for any auditor to only go back to the date of their last audit. That makes sense since an audit is just a snapshot in time so they just need to go back to when the last snapshot was taken. I can think of a few occasions where I went further back then my last audit however it usually has something to do with seeing whether a trend exists over a longer period of time, OR to see if this problem has been written up before in previous audits. Nothing prevents an auditor from going further back in time in order to help them assess whether the process is working or not… however if they do happen to find some problem in the historical archives then I would politely suggest that they should have caught this problem during their previous audits. On a cautionary note, tread carefully when using this strategy because when I’m told “Hey that’s not fair… we’ve doing it this same way all along and you never wrote us up last year”… to which my typical response is “an audit is only a snapshot at a point in time, and those records may not have been looked at during that snapshot”. On a final note, 99 times out of a 100, most auditors don’t have enough time to go further back than their last audit date.
Be sure to watch for our next Newsletter issue where I will be answering some of the questions that I get from Readers of my Newsletters about how to implement the requirements of ISO 9001:2015 in a specific and practical way, that will also help improve business performance…
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Need Help?
ISO 9001:2015 Internal Audit Outsourcing (we can do it for you OR with you!)
For cost effectiveness, the Internal Audit function can be outsourced to an external experienced auditor on a periodic basis. This will provide an independent and objective assessment to management, of where process issues may exist, along with identifying opportunities for improvement. It will also provide the evidence needed to satisfy the Internal Audit requirements in the ISO Standards. We have used two different approaches with this service: a) We conduct the entire audit ourselves, or b) We act as the lead auditor, and along with your Team of internal auditors, we complete the entire audit together. This latter approach allows your people to receive guidance and direction from an experienced lead auditor while at the same time maintaining significant involvement in the internal audit process.
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Internal Process Auditor Training for ISO 9001:2015
The two (2) day Internal Process Auditing for ISO 9001:2015 Training Session is focused on a process approach to auditing with the objective being not only to assess conformance of the quality management system, but also to uncover process improvements during an audit. This goes hand in hand with the process auditing requirements found within ISO 19011 and the process approach covered in ISO 9001:2015, which promotes continual process improvement throughout this Standard. An enhanced checklist is developed, and there will be workshops throughout, to reinforce learning, as well as a live, practice audit. If you are looking to meet the ISO 9001:2015 internal audit requirements and to “raise the bar” for your internal audit program then this is the course you should consider.
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Until next time…
Tim Renaud
Helping Business Professionals Reduce Risk and Remove Waste!