Many of you are aware about the term Audits, and also faced some audits in your organization.
Briefly Auditing is the activity where verification of process and quality management system is taking care of. Auditing ensures that are our processes or quality systems compliance with the requirements.
Audits and auditing is very important skills for Quality engineer and one of key step of your career roadmap.
Audits can be perform for complete organization or any particular process or production steps. Depends on what type of audit is perform. So lets see its types.
What are the types of Audits?
As a quality engineer you must know the types of audits and what are there requirements. It will help you when you face any audit in your organization or may be some day you will be auditor. So mainly there are three types of audits.
First Party Audit:
Mainly considered as internal audits. It is done within organization by the employee who are Certified Internal Auditors. There is annual plan for the internal audits and perform according to plan.
1. Process Audit
Now process audit is verify that “Is our process working in established or set standards”. It check weather we follow the process standards and their requirements. Are we conformance with all requirements or not?.
2. Product Audit
In the product audit we will examine or product or services. It evaluates weather our product and related services are meet requirements. The requirements can be specifications, customer specific requirements, Performance related requirement etc.
3. Internal System Audit
This type of audit is perform on management system. It evaluates weather we meet the requirements of Quality standards. It is the documented activity, where verification and evaluation of objective evidence is done.
There are many types of system audit, as per evaluation criteria
- Quality Management System Audit
- Environmental System Audit
- Safety System Audit
- Food Safety System Audit
Second Party Audit:
This type of audit is perform by the customer or contracted organization by the customer. Customer is fully involve in this audit and audit result may influence the business. It is more important because it is link to business from customer and will influence some decisions on current & future business.
This type of audit is more important because it is link to business from customer and will have effect or implications and decisions on current & future business.
Customers regularly conduct such audits to check the supplier system effectiveness and are they working on meeting customer specific requirement or not.
Some customer are genuinely doing such audits to improve supplier capability and produce a good quality product.
Third Party Audit:
Finally this audit is done by external agencies. This is mainly done for certifications, registrations, license or fine from external agencies or interested parties example, Government, regulatory bodies then also this audit made by those organizations.
The common third party audit is done for certification. And every organization are struggling to get the certification. Therefore every organization conducting this type of audit.
The important certification audits are ISO 9001:2015 globally.
For automotive industry it is mandatory that every organization must certified by IATF 16949:2016 standard.
These both standards focusing on the quality management system implementation within organizations.
The frequency of third party audit is once in 3 year. Some complex processes related to food industry usually done annually.
