What is Quality Management System? Different types of audit for quality management

What is Quality Management System?

A QMS integrates within the organisation the multiple inner processes and aims to provide a process strategy for project implementation. A process-based QMS allows organisations to identify, evaluate, regulate and enhance the different key company procedures that eventually lead to enhanced company results.

A good quality audit guarantees that a quality system is in place and that it is capable of providing clients with excellent quality.

Quality control audit also emphasizes the need to improve the quality management system to continuously produce excellent quality products or services.

Different Types of Audits for quality management:

There are many audit kinds, which depend on the purpose of the audit. There are different kinds of audits in technical terms.

System Audit:

Most organisations have different management or operating systems that make up a whole integrated management system when put together.

They decide to perform inner audits when management wishes to ensure that their systems are well maintained. A system audit is an audit carried out on any of a company’s systems. During a system audit, any non-conformity is critical, as if the system itself is incorrect, the output will probably be incorrect.

Service Quality Audit:

Product or service audit on the product or service itself to determine whether the product or service meets customer demands and the organization’s standard.

It could be ready to be delivered to the customer during the product manufacturing process, after the product has been manufactured, or even after the product has been packed.

This becomes very severe if there is any non-conformity during the quality assurance audit, as all non-conformities at this point are equal to client complaints.

Department / Functional Audit:

The department audit is conducted, as the name indicates, with a focus on a particular department or function. The audit range includes all the department’s operations, all the processes followed and all the technologies available in the department.

This type of audit highlights the areas for improvement in the specific department.

Process Audit

This is well recognized that different procedures are critical to an organization’s smooth running.

All operations from order investigation to product delivery in any organisation follow a departmental process.

All operations from order investigation to product delivery in any organisation follow a departmental process. Therefore an audit of such processes helps organizations to identify the areas for improvement.

The new version of ISO 9001 QMS requires companies to arrange outsourced process audits if any outsourcing is applicable.

Conformance Audit:

This QA audit is usually performed by external parties. It is a type of third-party audit where the auditing party evaluates whether the organisation fulfills the system criteria.

The certification businesses also periodically perform the conformance audit to ensure that the organisation meets the certification requirement.

Compliance Audit:

Regulatory agencies conduct a compliance audit to verify whether the organisation meets the legal and regulatory requirements.

A re-audit may be needed in the event of any non-compliance. The aim of the re-audit is to guarantee that the corrective measures made are effective.

Purpose of Audit Report:

The audit results are an audit report circulated to all concerned. The aim of any sort of QA audit is not to identify errors, but to identify regions for enhancement.

If it is done in this spirit by the auditor and the audited party, the organisation can be sure that it is on the way to enhancement and can satisfy all customer, scheme, legal or regulatory requirements continuously.