Quality Audit - Why FAIL (1)

Quality Audit

WHY QUALITY AUDIT FAIL?

(NOT EFFECTIVE)

REASON 1

NOT clearly DEFINE AND CLEAR ON OBJECTIVES OF AUDIT

Top Management, Auditor, Auditee, most of them thinks AUDIT is to find fault or JUST one of requirements to certified to ISO

But seldom the organization defined in their audit process, what is the objective in Qualitative manners i.e.

After audit

-        -   to reduce reject by 20%

-         -  to achieve ZERO Error in assembly

There are many other objective of AUDIT depending on what we want and the literature BELOW describe some of objectives of audit (Happy Reading)

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Quality audit can be categorized into compliance audit and management audit (Arter, 1994). Compliance audit look for conformance to the audit criteria, while management audit look for conformance to the audit criteria and the effectiveness of the process and opportunities for improvement in achieving organization goals. Example of conformance audit includes financial audit, tax audit, and regulatory audit. The management audit includes manufacturing audit, product and process audit, improvement audit, and diagnosis. The result of audit, normally presented as an audit report together with audit evidence. Hence the quality audit is categorized under management audit.

The objectives of audit are to look for conformance to a set of rules and the effectiveness of those rules in achieving organization goals (Arter, 1994). The set of rules and effectiveness of those rule refer to audit criteria. ISO 19011 (2002) used the term of audit criteria which is refer to specification, guideline, and requirements. The audit criteria vary from different type of audit. Quality audit criteria also can be refers as the objective of the audit. The most common criteria for quality audit is quality management system audit either it is first party, second party or third party audit as described in chapter 1.

Apart from quality management system audit, the quality audit also cover the specific performance improvement criteria. The review was undertake for research or work that been done regarding the quality audit apart from quality management system audit for the past 20 years. The objective of quality audit is table out in table 2.2.

Table 2.2: Objective of audits

Author (s)	Objectives of audit	Research method,  sample size (n)	Type of Industry or applicability	Significant contribution
Bobbit, 1989	Supplier Quality Audit	Nil	Nil	2 types of supplier audit. 8 categories for area to be audited
Hum and Leow, 1994	Manufacturing strategy	Survey, 55	Electronic in Singapore	Framework empirical studies of Hayes and Wheelwright, 1984
Martino, 1994	Technology	Nil	Nil	Framework for technology audit
Gardiner and Gregory, 1996	New Product Introduction	Case Study, 2	Telecommunication	Framework of NPI audit
Bitichi, 1997	Integrity of performance measure	Case study, 1	Small Engineering manufacturing firm	Workbook to conduct audit
Branney, 1999	Process Optimization	Action Case Study, 1	Fertilizer	3 phased of analysis. 86 improvements ideas. Potential hard saving of USD 2 millions
Lee and Quazi, 2000	Self assessment for quality awards	Questionnaire analysis, 200	Singapore firms	Self assessment methodology
Hepner,Wilcock and Aung, 2004	use of auditing as a tool for continual improvement	Case study, 4	Meat industries	Application of audit
Gordon, 2005	Supplier performance measure	Nil	Nil	7 steps to measure supplier performance

The literature on quality audit by Skinner (1978, 1985), Platt and Gregory (1990, 1992) contribute their work to formulate manufacturing strategy through the use of quality audits. The work of Skinner, Platt and Gregory were further study by Menda (2005). Menda criticized that the previous audit framework does not provide alternative to the manager. The audit tools and techniques develop by Menda is very useful to start for quality audit in different audit criteria.

Bobbit and Gordon (1989) and Gordon (2005) presented the need of supplier audit. There are series of quality audit namely supplier audit commonly conduct by customer’s auditor or contracted auditor to verify supplier quality performance. Commonly, customer specifics requirements i.e. Ford Specific Requirements are used as audit criteria. Most of customer specifics requirements are adopted from quality management system requirements i.e. ISO9001 and ISO/TS16949 i.e. Visteon, Delphi, TRW, GM, DCM specific requirements.

Gardiner and Gregory (1996) proposed the method to audit the New Product Introduction process with the main objective to propose process re-design based on comprehensive audit of existing New Product Introduction process. Quality audit also has been used to determine flexibility requirements in manufacturing facilities (Das and Patel, 2002). The audit focus whether the organization should introduce or improve flexible manufacturing and at the same time evaluate the impact of the changes proposed on the performance.

Lee and Quazi (2000) described the award based auditing through self assessment and verification from relevant body through report compile from organization and site audit. The most common award based were Malcomn Baldridge quality award.

In summary, the type of audit was depending on audit criteria or objectives. The most common audit objectives and criteria included:

i.                    Specific improvement activities audit

ii.                  Management system requirement i.e. ISO9001 Quality Management System requirements for QMS certification audit

iii.                Customer specifics requirements i.e. Ford Specific Requirements for supplier audit

iv.                Award Based Criteria i.e. Prime Minister Quality award for assessment on best practice