Planning your certification audit
You have chosen your certification provider. They have conducted the document review. They have conducted the stage 1 review. Now, depending on the requirements of the certification provider, they have deemed you ready for the certification audit. This will be based on the progress of your corrective actions raised during the previous two steps and the required volume of records to enable the effectiveness of your quality management system to be judged. This can be a week, a month, the magic three months, a year or any time frame deemed appropriate.
Once you achieve this milestone, your certification body will send through an audit plan detailing what they will be auditing, when, who and duration. Remember this is only a plan and all stakeholders should agree to the content of the plan. You as the auditee should realise that all clauses will need to be audited in the certification audit. You cannot skip anything other than those clauses deemed not applicable. Make sure people are available, make sure they are the people who are responsible and endeavour to provide substitutes in case of absentees. A very important point is that you can and will fail an audit if a clause cannot be audited, and a clause cannot be audited if the person responsible for the clause (or their substitute) is absent.
These plans should be in your possession within a week prior to an audit. Insist on it. Do not accept a situation that allows the auditor or audit team to do planning on the morning of the audit.
If they provide a plan that is purely based on the clauses and elements of the standard, it is the ‘quality manager’s role to ‘convert’ such requirements into a meaningful plan / schedule of meetings and appointments that best suit your personnel and business sgtructure. The aspects that remain constant in any certification audit plan are; entry meeting, lunch, audit team meeting, exit meeting. The rest is very situational.
Now, as a final note, here are a few hints about lunch. Last century it was a given, an expectation, that you provided lunch to the auditors. Some auditees, used this opportunity to waste time or ply the auditor for information. Neither is very productive. Today, it is not expected, but it is a nice touch. However, before you order a banquet, ask the auditors whether they have brought their lunch or would they like lunch provided. Check on dietary needs and limit the numbers from your company to the key stakeholders and enable plenty of time for the audit team to be able to speak privately amongst themselves before they recommence auditing. If you have decided not to provide lunch, provide them with instructions on how / where to get lunch, the time, etc during in the entry meeting.