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Yes I know, ideally your company should be ready for an external audit every day of the year. However, most of the time, you will need at least a couple of weeks to gather all the information required. Here are a few important points that must always be checked before an external audit.

Perform a legislation compliance check

Make sure you have checked if your organisation complies with national and international laws and legislations. Most ISO standards are very clear on this. The company has to prove that it works according to statutory and regulatory requirements. Performing this check will help prevent a lot of uncomfortable discussions with the auditor.

Train Employees

It still happens often that employees get anxious when the auditor arrives at their desk for the external audit. You can prevent this by training the most anxious people in the team. The top performers on a regular day sometimes simply forget how they work the moment the auditor is next to them. If your management system is working as it should, the processes/procedures will describe how the people are working. There is no need for people to be anxious about the audit, just tell them to do their job as they always do.

Tools

Make sure all the tools are certified if required and properly calibrated. If during the external audit, the auditor spots an employee working with an uncertified tool this will most likely lead to an NCR, especially when he/she digs a little deeper and find more of these uncertified tools.

Documentation control

If you are not using any automated system then this is a must. Just sit down and go over every single document to make sure the latest version is available to the team and that the version is correct. You have to check these to prevent employees from using the wrong documents the moment the auditor sits next to them. Of course the easiest way is just to automate this, which will save you a lot of time.

These are by far all the points you have to take into consideration for an audit. If you have any more please share them in the comments.

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