Who does your Auditing?

Hi Everyone -

I am curious to know how everyone has their auditing structured, below are a few of our current discussion topics surrounding this topic?

• Do you have an independent department/group that does all the auditing?
• If you do not have an independent department/group, who does the auditing within your organization?
• If you do have an independent department/group that does do the auditing, who within the company do they report to.

These questions stem from the idea of not grading your own homework so to speak and the recommendation from SQF that where possible, the auditing personnel are an independent group.

We are pretty small - one manager has a couple departments (I got QA and HSE!) and we're all HR -

We each audit different areas at a time for inspections (warehouse does the walk through for maintenance, packaging does the walk through for warehouse, etc) .  I've trained them all and given them lazer pointers to look up, and we have a short list of 4-5 issues we've been seeing lately to look for.

Since I can not audit my own work, our plant manager took HACCP/Internal Auditor/SQF implementation courses so that he would be able to audit my work.  You can easily argue that he is not independent as he oversees all operations, but I'm just hoping it doesn't come to that.  He is also my designated back up, so needs all of the training I have, and he's my boss, so he needs to understand my work.  It's like 3 birds.

He only took the HACCP/SQF implementing course as a pre req to take the internal auditor course/training to be back up, but I can not tell you how immensely it has helped Management Commitment.  Even the HACCP class was eye opening to him - that's the reason we have an active HACCP team that really evaluates all risks together (before, it was like "QA, evaluate the risks for us / what can we do to pass the audit")  .

We are a small company.

I wear many hats including QA Manager, SQF practitioner and Internal auditor.

I was unable to be independent of the auditing my own work and so had to wear both hats and be objective.

Hope this helps.

We are pretty small aswell we have about 19 people most of which work on the packing line

We have 2 (3 soon) members of management, 1 quality tech, and 2 packers on the team. It's very hard to create division between what you work on and what you audit because the managers and the quality tech are on the food safety team.

Do your best to have people outside of what is being audited perform the audit.  I made an audit matrix and we assign audits at a meeting which we have every few months to talk about our progress, address any issues, and assign the next 2 or 3 months of audits.

Mainly the HACCP Coordinator and QA Manager do audits at our facility but we do a plant wide food safety audit quarterly and 2 supervisors at a time are involved with that, rotating them quarterly.  I know SQF is really pushing for a team of employees from different areas of the facility to form an audit team but it is not feasible for us to have several people pulled away from their jobs at a time. 

We should start an internal auditing barter system where people with similar food audit each other's programs so we never have to worry about it.   I just keep thinking "Well at GiantMegaCo I was the only QA, but to audit PRPs I gave them to the closest person who was also a single QA at another factory and audited hers."

The non disclosure issue would make factory lawyers spin if we had any....but we totally don't!