Quality Audit: Critical Success Factors

WHY  quality audit:

-          Not deliver added value to organizations.

-          Cost added activities

-          Fail improve the organization performance.

There are six FACTORS extracted from Literature review and confirmed by survey, which are 

TAA AAT

TOP MANAGEMENT (CSF1)

AUDIT PROCESS (CSF2)

AUDITOR (CSF3)

AUDITEE (CSF4)

AUDIT EVALUATION (CSF5)

TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES (CSF6)

A bit detailed of literature as followed: (for those interested to read.... :)

There are several factors in quality audit implementation that may contribute to the criticism of quality audit:. 

Not deliver added value to organizations.

Cost added activities

Fail improve the organization performance.

Russel and Regel (1996) described that the factors are due to incomplete process of quality audit or failure to closed the quality audit loop. M. Rajendran and Devadasan (2005) conducted detail literature research in quality audit in order to explore the current status, prowess, and future of quality audits to assist both researchers and practitioners to adopt quality-auditing practice for achieving the objectives of continuous quality improvement (CQI) models like total quality management (TQM). The research indicated various quality-auditing techniques shall be examined. The main area that considered lacking was no linkage to tangible performance measure of quality audit. Performance measurement is very important for the effective management of any quality initives of organization. According to Deming without measuring something, it is impossible to improve it. Therefore, to improve effectiveness of quality audit, one needs to determine the extent of quality audit implementation and measure its impact on business performance. Kaplan and Norton (1996) emphasized that financial indicators would measure the organization past performance. Therefore, in  non-financial categories should be added to measure the organization. 

Quality audit only can be realised with the auditors.  In 1984, ASQC was developed certification exam and in 1986 the committee published the guidelines for Auditing of Quality Systems. Later, more quality audit guideline was published included ISO10011 (1991), ASQ Quality Audit Handbook (1997 and 1999)  and the most recent was ISO19011 (2002) that described the competency requirements of the auditor. Hawkes and Adams (1995) have appraised the important role to be played by the quality auditors and listed the characteristics required by quality auditor. Thus, the quality auditor was considered as one of quality audit implementation issues.

           

Others implementation issues was to consider the total quality management (TQM) and Quality System (QS) implementation issues. Since quality audit is part of TQM and QS, quality audit was assumed to share the same issues with TQM and QS. Dale et al. (1997) have used a TQM sustaining audit tool to examine the sustainability of TQM. Saraph et al. (1989) iniated the study on TQM implementations issues and developed 78 items related to TQM practices, and classified into eight critical factors to measure the performance of TQM in an organization. The studied labelled these critical factors as: 1) Role of top management, 2) role of TQM and organizational performance of the quality department, 3) training, 4) product and service design, 5) supplier quality management, 6) process management, 7) quality data and reporting, 8) and employee relations. Flyyn et al. (1994) developed another instrument which that was close resemblance to the preceding instrument developed by Saraph et al. (1989). More theoritical was developed the theoretical foundation of total quality management practice (Anderson et al. ,1994; Yusof and Aspinwall, 2000) and all the scholars agreed that top management, the organization itself, process management, tools and techniques and reporting as the critical factors for TQM and QS. Hence, focused on the above factors were considered during the development of effective quality audit framework.

            

The issues and the criticals factors were considered as the baseline for current quality audit framework reviews discussed in next section as followed:

-          Top Management commitments

-          Quality audit processes

-          Quality audit tools and techniques

-          Quality of auditors

-          The organization audited

-          Quality audit performance measures 

Have a nice day

Edly Ramly

18 Oct 2012