3 replies to this topic

[EvaB]

Hello out there in Food Safety land!

 

We are a relatively small company with 35 employees, 23 of which are in the production and warehousing departments.

 

Could somebody offer advice on how to perform internal audits on departments indireclty and not at all connected to food safety issues? For example the purchasing department. I know that purchasing is a PRP and we handle it accordingly but our purchasing department consists of 1 person, who is a member of the Food Safety Team and who works together with us. How do we audit him? Or how do we audit the finance department, also one person? And how do we audit the sales department? What questions do we ask?

 

We were audited yesterday and the auditor was asking for such audit reports with evaluation and targets for the future.

 

Thanks so much to anybody who can offer some help!

 

Eva

[redfox]

Hello Eva,

 

Anybody in your site can audit him except for himself.  As long as there is no bias in doing the audit, other department can audit other department. Just check the competency of the personnel conducting the internal audit. It is a requirement that an internal auditor must have undergone internal auditor training and must have the certificate as evidence.

 

regards,

redfox

[GMO]

You can audit purchasing activities; why not look at whether approved suppliers are being used?  Whether a specification is in place etc?  The BRC standard (even if you're not working to it) gives good guidelines of what you should have.

 

Why are you looking to audit the financial department?  That's a job for a trained financial auditor surely?

[EvaB]

Thank you GMO!

 

The FSSC auditor we had in is actually a business advisor and she was big into auditing the various departments of the company and setting goals to be reached. I believe she was auditing "over our heads" and not really realistically auditing us relative to the FSSC 22000 standard. But that's another story...

 

The thing is, I work hand in hand with the purchaser & make sure he only uses approved suppliers. Our purchaser is only allowed to sign a contract when we in the quality dept. give the go ahead and we only do that when we have the full set of documents we require and they have been checked and approved. When we conduct an audit of the FSMS documentation a traceability test is included. This traceability test will include checking the purchasing paperwork incl. all documents, validity, correctness etc. So, I guess what I really need to do is to redefine the internal audit of FSMS documentation in such a way as to include the terms "Purchasing Department" and "Sales Department" paperwork.

 

I have a copy of BRC7 and will check that out - thank you very much for the tip!

 

Thanks once again and all the very best,

Eva