Quantifying internal audit tasks

I am in a small food manufacturing company. We have limited employees and I have been tasked with completing the FSSC 22000 internal audits. I was going to have a team, work load in all departments has left me without any auditors. To demonstrate to management we need more QA staffing I have to quantify how many hours an internal audit would take to complete. I am a lead auditor and have not this at other locations with a team, never alone. If anyone has any ideas of quantifying this task I would appreciate the help.

This is a very difficult one to answer, and one you're going to have to be your own cheerleader on.

I have 0 experience with FSSC, but I do with BRC and SQF so I'll speak in those generalities. I could technically hammer through an entire internal audit of the scheme in a couple of days.

To do it CORRECTLY and THOROUGHLY though, that's going to take a whole heck of a lot longer. I'm sure I could task someone to do my internal audits faster than I do them, but then I could go behind them and find 50 things they missed, which makes the internal audit they did pretty useless.

The key IMO is to point out how many non-conformances you're finding and how much work will need to be done to correct them in order to bolster your argument for support staff needed vs. trying to quantify how many hours an audit will take. 

Hi Debsday,

:welcome:

Welcome to the IFSQN forums

I would start by generating an audit plan that covers the whole food safety management system including Policies, Procedures, Operations, Hazard Control Plans and Prerequisite Programmes.

From the plan if you have time you could generate a checklist for each audit. Based on the checklist or the extent of operations/procedures you could then estimate a time each audit would take based on previous experience and historical internal audits.

Don't forget there is also a requirement for Inspections as per FSSC 22000 Additional Requirements 2.5.12 PRP Verification.

The following additional requirement applies to ISO 22000:2018 clause 8.8.1:

• The organization shall establish, implement, and maintain routine (e.g., monthly) site inspections/PRP checks to verify that the site (internal and external), production environment and processing equipment are maintained in a suitable condition to ensure food safety. The frequency and content of the site inspections/PRP checks shall be based on risk with defined sampling criteria and linked to the relevant technical specification.

Kind regards,

Tony